WTF 10/2/2024

Georgia judge tells America that “Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property…”

Recently Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney issued a ruling that struck down Georgia’s six-week abortion ban. Unfortunately the judge’s ruling will not  stand.

Since McBurney’s ruling was handed down the case was forwarded to the Georgia Supreme Court to be reviewed… a court where eight of nine justices were appointed by a Republican governor, and which has reinstated the abortion law once before, when Judge Robert McBurney had previously struck the law down.

If anyone believes that the Georgia Supreme Court will do anything but rule against Judge McBurney’s decision I got bridges in NYC for sale… Cheap!

However, Ruth Marcus, an associate editor for the Washington Post, recently wrote an opinion piece that said McBurney’s decision was “… worth paying attention to even if it is destined to be overturned. It offers one of the most compelling and straightforward defenses of the right to abortion that I have encountered in decades of writing about this issue.”

And I agree…

McBurney doesn’t mince his words and is blunt.

First…

McBurney says the Georgia law and it’s  six-week abortion ban that was at question and the basis for his ruling  had set an “awkwardly arbitrary” limit which prohibits abortion once there is a “detectable human heartbeat.” McBurney observed in his decision that at the stage being discussed “… the ‘heart’ is a tiny cluster of cells that periodically pulses and pushing blood through the quarter-inch embryo that still sports a vestigial tail.” And then essentially and bluntly says that “(Georgia) has seized upon a point in gestation that has political salience, rather than medical or moral salience.”

But more importantly… to me this is… McBurney said, “Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote. Forcing a woman to carry an unwanted, not-yet-viable fetus to term violates her constitutional rights to liberty and privacy, even taking into consideration whatever bundle of rights the not-yet-viable fetus may have.”

AND…

“It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could — or should — force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another… When someone other than the pregnant woman is able to sustain the fetus, then — and only then — should those other voices have a say in the discussion about the decisions the pregnant woman makes concerning her body and what is growing within it.”

In short…

This might not be the one and only time a sitting judge said that women are not chattel who can be forced into making health care decisions that are not of her own making and that the government should in a phrase… “butt out.”

But it is the first time I can recall where a judge said it so very clearly, in such specific language and did so it so damn bluntly.  

Simply put as Judge McBurney told the state of Georgia and its law makers, as well as America at large… and as the Post’s Ms. Marcus in her editorial concludes…

The choice is for the woman to make, not the government, at any level.

Another thousand words…