An encouraging ruling

It's not huge, but the Supreme Court has ruled that requiring fetal remains to be either incinerated or buried after prenatal infanticide does not impose an undue burden on the "right" to abortion.  It's not much, but here's what it means; it means that the Court has found that a minor addition to the expense and difficulty of prenatal infanticide like the cost of cremation or burial is not inconsistent with previous jurisprudence.  It also is worth noting that half the "liberal" wing agreed with this.


We might infer that if, say, Planned Parenthood loses federal and state funding, that that also would not violate current precedent.  And that is good news.


And of course, there is a discouraging ruling that the rest of the law, which prohibits abortion for reasons of race, sex, ancestry, or fetal abnormality, is indeed unconstitutional.  But that noted, we might wonder precisely how, if abortion is otherwise legal, we would punish this.  It's almost routine to have a sex determination ultrasound, and of course parents would know what race, ancestry, or fetal abnormality their child would be--and hence nothing would prevent them from acting on this information and telling the abortionist "none of your business." 


My take on the second part is that it was an unforced error by the Indiana legislature.  There are very real things that can be done to rein in this atrocity, but those provisions are not among them.