Over the years we’ve heard all sorts of attempts to downplay abortions as something insignificant rather than an act that destroys the life of an unborn children and injures women.
During yesterday’s oral arguments in the Hobby Lobby case, which observers think will have the Supreme Court ultimately siding with the Christian-run business in its efforts to not have to pay for abortion-causing drugs, Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the latest to make an oft-putting comparison.
While the lawyer for the Obama administration appeared surprised that the case had anything to do with abortion, Justice Sotomayor compared abortions to vaccinations and blood transfusions.
Supreme Court proceedings make for notoriously difficult and unreliable predictors of how justices might rule on a case. That said, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg wasted no time in pressing the corporate challengers, according to the Wall Street Journal‘s live blog of the oral arguments.
Justice Sotomayor started by asking, if corporations can object on religious grounds to providing contraception coverage, could they also object to vaccinations or blood transfusions? Paul Clement, the lawyer representing the challengers, said that contraception is different, because the government has already given an exemption to religious nonprofits. Justice Kagan then said that there are several medical treatments to which some religious groups object, and if corporations could object to providing coverage for those treatments, “everything would be piecemeal. Nothing would be uniform.”
So objecting to killing people in abortions is akin to objecting to vaccinations or blood transfusions?
This is one of the more surprising revelations since Justice Kagan ironically compared abortion clinics to slaughterhouses.
