Gina Raimondo, the Democrat candidate for governor, has been in the news the past couple of days for declaring her strong support for abortion as she accepted the endorsement of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading provider in child-killing services.  Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin has made the unavoidable statement that a person with such radical beliefs about abortion can’t, in good conscience, call herself a Catholic.

On Twitter, Andrew and Patrick were most interested in the 1997 law that Raimondo spoke about repealing.  Andrew identified this as the law, which deals mostly with partial-birth abortion, and Patrick found this district court ruling, which found the law unconstitutional.

On the politics of the thing, Raimondo has essentially made the cynical political move of promising to work to repeal a law that the state can’t enforce anyway.  It’s a play at the silly “war on women” campaign theme.  To the extent that anybody cares about the law’s repeal, it can only be to ensure that a dramatic shift in federal law wouldn’t suddenly make it constitutional, and therefore enforceable.

Pause a moment and absorb the implication: partial-birth abortion is legal in Rhode Island, and a gubernatorial candidate wants to make doubly sure that it remains legal for a doctor to just about deliver a baby and kill him or her.

The most telling thing about Raimondo’s radicalism and the district court ruling is the attitude of those whom we allow to govern us.  Raimondo’s attitude during the press conference was that there’s simply no argument against killing unborn children.  But the chief judge of the district court, Ronald Lagueux, really outdid the gubernatorial candidate when it comes to callous disregard for human life.

This is from the legal explanation of his ruling; it’s the substance of the issue, and even in clinical terms, it’s difficult to read:

In the D&X [abortion procedure], the physician extracts the fetus intact, feet first, until the cervix is obstructed by the fetal skull.  The skull is crushed either with forcepts or by inserting a sharp instrument into the base of the fetal skull and evacuating the brain.

However clinical we try to be, that’s barbaric.  Now consider this sampling from the summary with which Lagueux begins his ruling, in which he’s preparing to declare that procedure legal in Rhode Island:

Almost immediately, this case was filed, and this Court predicted that constitutional pruning would be necessary.  Thus in 1998, the Legislature transplanted language from a Congressional bill in the hopes of escaping the shears.

Let’s give Lagueux the benefit of the doubt that he’s simply too callous to have imagined the connection between “escaping the shears” and “inserting a sharp instrument into the base of the fetal skull.”  Even then, it tells us quite a bit about the attitude of our ruling elite that a judge would see no problem with such a playful introduction to his seal of approval for not-quite-infanticide.

And let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, again, that he never expected members of the general public to read his ruling.  Hey, maybe Raimondo didn’t expect anybody actually to pay attention to her endorsement by an organization that turns not-quite-infanticide into a profitable business.