Eugene Volokh quotes from yesterday’s decision by U.S. District Judge Myron H. Thompson in Planned Parenthood Southeast Inc. v. Strange (M.D. Ala. Aug. 4, 2014). Here’s part of the decision, with some obvious editing by me:

In order to give “real substance to the woman’s liberty ability to commit murder,” while at the same time fully honoring the State’s ability to pursue, in good faith, its own acknowledged legitimate interests, one of which is to prevent murder, this court concludes that it must hold that this requirement [that all doctors who provide abortions must have staff privileges to perform designated procedures at a local hospital] is unconstitutional. The evidence compellingly demonstrates that the requirement would have the striking result of closing three of Alabama’s five abortion clinics, clinics which perform only early abortions murders, long before viability the births of the children who in almost all cases would have become “viable” fetuses were it not for abortion. Indeed, the court is convinced that, if this requirement would not, in the face of all the evidence in the record, constitute an impermissible undue burden, then almost no regulation, short of those imposing an outright prohibition on abortion, would deny some women their manufactured constitutional right to commit murder….

In deciding this case, the court was struck by a false parallel in some respects between the manufactured right of women to decide to terminate a pregnancy murder defenseless fetuses and the right of the individual to keep and bear firearms, including handguns, in her home for the purposes of self-defense. At its core, each protected right is held by the individual: the manufactured right to decide to have an abortion commit murder and the time-honored right to have and use firearms for self-defense, that is, to prevent murder and other types of crime.

However, neither right can be fully exercised without the assistance of someone else. The manufactured right to abortion murder a fetus that would almost certainly have become viable cannot be exercised without a medical professional (a misstatement that bolsters my false analogy), and the right to keep and bear arms for defense against murder means little if there is no one from whom to acquire the handgun or ammunition….

With this parallelism in mind, the court poses the hypothetical that suppose, for the public weal the purpose of depriving citizens of their time-honored right to self defense, the federal or state government were to implement a new restriction on who may sell firearms and ammunition and on the procedure they must employ in selling such goods and that, further, only two vendors in the State of Alabama were capable of complying with the restriction: one in Huntsville and one in Tuscaloosa.

…Similarly, in this case, so long as the Supreme Court continues to recognize a manufactured constitutional right to choose to terminate a pregnancy murder a defenseless fetus that almost certainly would have become viable, any regulation that would, in effect, restrict the exercise of that right murderous act to only Huntsville and Tuscaloosa should be subject to the same skepticism condemned for not having gone far enough….

Judge Thompson’s patently biased analogy abets barbarism.

P.S. Only after publishing the original post and later making some editorial changes did I learn that Judge Thompson was appointed to the bench by Jimmy Carter. Jimmy must be proud of Myron’s use of twisted logic in the service of left-wing orthodoxy.

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Related posts:
Law, Liberty, and Abortion
Privacy, Autonomy, and Responsibility
Substantive Due Process and the Limits of Privacy
Crimes against Humanity
Abortion and Logic
Abortion, Doublethink, and Left-Wing Blather
Abortion, “Gay Rights,” and Liberty