Court Opinion

ID: 8409699
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-11-02 17:07:00.457766+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T16:47:42.530637
License: Public Domain

WILKINSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring in the denial of rehearing en banc.
Whatever one’s views on the various issues surrounding abortion, ending the life of an infant at the moment of its birth is a uniquely disturbing act.
At the very least, the democratic process should not be precluded from coming to that judgment. We have always relied upon that process to soften the harsh blows of life. The New Deal and Great Society had in common a desire to help those who through no fault of their own found themselves in straitened circumstances. If our democracy can work to enhance equal opportunity in life, should it not also be permitted here to enhance the opportunity for life to begin? I am at a loss to explain how a partially born child *162can be excluded from the American embrace.
Whether a health exception to a partial birth abortion ban is a necessity or a loophole — and the proper scope of such exceptions — strike me as altogether fair and debatable questions, but again, I believe the political process deserves some leeway in arriving at the answers. Our democracy often cools passions by giving them appropriate expression. The partial birth abortion debate will, I fear, be only further inflamed through judicially imposed solutions.
The moment a child is brought into the world is supposed to represent the ultimate in human joy. Instead, through methods of partial birth abortion too gruesome to bear repetition here, medical science is employed to bring a child’s life to an end. That a right to the “intact D&E/ D&X procedure” is now found in no less than our founding document is simply and indescribably sad. The means that so transform the miracle of birth are not something this good land should seek to constitutionalize.
We do not write upon a clean slate here. As circuit judges, we are bound to follow the Supreme Court. I can find no fair basis for distinguishing this case from Stenberg v. Carhart, 530 U.S. 914, 120 S.Ct. 2597, 147 L.Ed.2d 743 (2000). For that reason, I vote to deny rehearing en banc.