Kagan and the War on Science

ChelseaAbortion, Politics, ScienceLeave a Comment

Yuval Levin posted at the Corner:

If you haven’t read Shannen Coffin’s piece on Elena Kagan and the partial-birth-abortion debate today, you really should. What he describes, based on newly released Clinton White House memos, is absolutely astonishing.

What’s described in these memos is easily the most serious and flagrant violation of the boundary between scientific expertise and politics I have ever encountered. A White House official formulating a substantive policy position for a supposedly impartial physicians’ group, and a position at odds with what that group’s own policy committee had actually concluded? You have to wonder where all the defenders of science—those intrepid guardians of the freedom of inquiry who throughout the Bush years wailed about the supposed politicization of scientific research and expertise—are now. If the Bush White House (in which I served as a domestic policy staffer) had ever done anything even close to this it would have been declared a monumental scandal, and rightly so.

Apparently scientific integrity only matters as long as it doesn’t somehow infringe on abortion. That, of course, was always the lesson of the stem-cell debate in the Bush years anyhow. But clearly it started earlier. It’s good to know where Kagan’s priorities are. Let’s hope senators are paying attention.

I tweeted the Coffin piece he’s talking about yesterday, but it really deserves to be shared everywhere and with as many people as possible. Barring some sort of miracle, this will soon be our newest Supreme Court justice, so, in case you haven’t seen it yet, read it and weep (really, you just might): Kagan’s Abortion Distortion. This is also the subject of Jill Stanek’s WND column this week.

More on the war on science:
Korean Court Rules Embryo is Not A Life Form
Stealth Legislation to Federally Fund Human Cloning

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