It’s easy to stand on principle when you disagree with a result. It’s much harder to do so when the result is desirable, but the means to get there are not.
That’s the dilemma we face with the ruling this past week by a state judge that allowed Mississippi’s nearly total ban on abortion to go into effect.
Debbra Halford, a chancery judge from Franklin County, was in a pickle. Mississippi had just taken a case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court that resulted in the historic overturning of Roe v. Wade and rightfully returned to the states the authority to decide whether to allow abortion and under what conditions. It was assumed that in Mississippi this ruling would bring the nearly immediate end of surgical abortions and the closure of the state’s only abortion clinic.
There was one problem, though: a 1998 decision of the state Supreme Court that said the Mississippi Constitution provides women the right to an abortion. The operator of the lone abortion clinic hung its argument, and its bid to stay open, on that decision, claiming that subsequent state laws — which kicked in following last month’s U.S. Supreme Court decision — were invalid as long as that 1998 decision remained on the books.
Halford disagreed, saying that it was likely the state Supreme Court would reverse itself, just like the U.S. Supreme Court did 49 years after Roe v. Wade.
Halford might possess the power to read people’s minds, but if so, she should limit exercising that gift to parlor games, not employ it in the courtroom. The current makeup of the Mississippi Supreme Court may well believe that its 1998 ruling was bad law, but if so, the justices should be the ones saying so, not a lower court judge.
Halford probably knew her ruling would be appealed to the state Supreme Court either way she ruled, and the safe thing for her to do politically was to rule against the abortion clinic. It does, however, appear to be an abuse of judicial discretion. Lower court judges are supposed to apply what the appellate courts have said, not what they might say.
As eager as we are for the number of abortions in this state to be reduced and the lives of unborn children saved, it needs to be done through the correct means.
If there is no right to privacy, and thus no right to abortion, in the Mississippi Constitution, the state Supreme Court needs to reverse itself and say so. If such a right exists in state law, then the Legislature can go through the proper legal channels to remove it by placing a constitutional amendment before a vote of the people.
This may take longer than a judge’s mind-reading, but the result will be through a legal process that’s respected, rather than one that’s not.
