It has finally happened—a Supreme Court justice has decided to retire while America has a pro-abortion majority in the House and Senate, as well as a pro-abortion president.
The good news is, the retiring justice is none other than David Hackett Souter, a known left-leaning member of the Supreme Court. This is good news precisely because the new justice is not going to tilt the Supreme Court’s delicate balance significantly in either direction.
Obama’s proposed replacement, Sonia Sotomayor, is in many ways an unknown quantity on the abortion question. Her one judicial brush with the issue came when she wrote the opinion for the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy v. Bush case. In her opinion, she upheld the constitutionality of the Mexico City Policy, which says that public funds cannot be spent funding overseas abortion. However, we have yet to be exposed to her thinking on the actual issue.
President Obama, quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, said that he primarily picked Sotomayor because of her “experience,” which, according to Holmes, is the “life of the law.”
“It is experience that can give a person a common touch and a sense of compassion,” the President said, “an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live.”
All we can hope is that Sotomayor’s “compassion” and “common touch” might lead her to see the terrible injustice of the practice of abortion, an injustice carried out every day on our nation’s children.
