Follow the money

Kathleen Parker today writes about one of the most truly twisted forms of legal logic I've come across. Have we really gone this far, and can we ever go back?

Banzhaf likes to sue people, in other words, and he’s been enormously successful. Which is to say, pregnant smokers, beware.

Already Banzhaf is setting his sights on fetal rights related to their smoking mums. While it is legally defensible to abort a fetus up until moments before birth, it is apparently inconceivable that a woman would expose her unborn child to the harmful effects of smoking.

While you’re struggling to wrap your mind around that nonsensical nugget, Banzhaf is already issuing press releases. In a recent one from the organization he heads, Action on Smoking and Health, Banzhaf predicts that prohibiting smoking by pregnant women would pass constitutional muster.

“Since court after court has held that smoking is not a fundamental right like voting, and that smokers are not a protected class like African-Americans or women, the government has wide leeway in fashioning a remedy for whatever it concludes is a problem requiring corrective action.”

Please do not read my disgust as anything akin to endorsing smoking by pregnant women. Far from it. What I find disgusting about the whole affair is that on one hand we listen to the screeching of "keep your laws off my body" by the pro-abort crowd, and here's an example of where the law is trying to do precisely that. The same lawyers who defend a woman's right to kill her own child in her womb are now going to sue to protect the health of the unborn.

Why?

Simple. Follow the money.