Life Legal files SCOTUS brief demolishing Roe’s viability standard
California | July 27, 2021
Life Legal filed an important amicus brief today in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in support of Mississippi’s “Gestational Age Act,” which prohibits abortion after 15 weeks. We filed the brief on behalf of Dr. Robin Pierucci, a neonatologist and bioethicist who is a nationally recognized expert in care for “micro-preemies,” who are very young premature babies born during the second trimester of pregnancy.
Our brief is an attack on the unworkable “viability” standard adopted by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade and affirmed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which has cost the lives of millions of babies. These cases rely on a highly subjective determination of a baby’s “capability of meaningful life outside the mother’s womb.”
But who is to say which life has meaning? The Court? The State? The abortionist?
Instead, we urge the Court to look to its own ruling in Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, where it found that a state does not have to make judgments about the “quality” of an individual’s life but can “assert an unqualified interest” in protecting human life. The Cruzan case involved a disabled young woman whose parents wanted to remove her feeding tube. The Court did not accept the parent’s argument that their daughter’s lack of a sufficient “quality of life” was a reason to kill her and held that a higher standard of evidence was required before someone could make the irreversible decision to end the life of a person who cannot communicate his or her wishes. In so doing, the Court affirmed the state’s interest in protecting human life, without regard to the perceived worth of that life. (Excerpts from Life Legal Defence Foundation)