Complete insanity and partial-birth abortion

So I don't know where Posner gets off denouncing the state legislatures for any irrationality in the law. It took those smart guys on the Supreme Court to come up with a right-to-kill, limited to victims within the uterus. The states are simply trying to legislate within the deranged and grisly analytical framework imposed on them by the Supreme Court,

'ls,' Again

Notably, Judge Posner has not lost all capacity to draw distinctions. He is still able to discern searing distinctions between abortionists who do not enthusiastically embrace partial-birth abortions and those who do. A certain Dr. Giles, for example, Posner smears as a man who-among other things-"may not even be wholly reputable." The abuse Posner heaps on Giles is interesting because Giles is, after all, an abortionist.

But this abortionist made the mistake of testifying in favor of the partial-birth abortion laws. Consequently, Judge Posner creates a record of invective against Giles-- in order to destroy his credibility in future cases.

Abortionists who do support partial-birth abortions, on the other hand, are praised as "reputable physicians""more reputable, perhaps.... than Dr. Giles."

Judge Posner additionally claims to find the laws "incurably ambiguous," because "[n]either 'biological offspring' nor 'living' is defined." When great jurists who heretofore could parse fine legal distinctions suddenly claim total befuddlement over words such as "offspring," it's fair to assume someone's leg is being pulled. i, myself, have no idea what Judge Posner is trying to get at, here. What does he mean by "define"? Define "incurably."

And what the heck does "is" mean?

Perhaps it would have been clearer if, instead of using charged words such as "the biological offspring of human parents," "human fetus," "infant" or "child;' the legislators had referred to crushing the skull of a "choice."

Posner complains that the law's requirement that a physician intend to perform a D & X abortion specifically (and not a constitutionally protected D & E abortion, which then inadvertently becomes a D & X if the baby slips out) is contrary to the intent requirement of other criminal law statutes.

Under murder statutes, for example, it is sufficient that one intend to do the act that causes the death of another person. The state is not required to prove that the defendant intended to cause the death itself.

Consequently, Posner denounces the state's attorney for admitting that the physician would have to intend to commit a D & X abortion specifically, rather than simply intend to, say, dilate the cervix, which then dilates too much, the baby come out and-whoops-it's a partial-birth abortion.

Posner says, "By this logic-which the state's Solicitor General actually embraced at argument-if you fire a machine gun into a lighted college dormitory at night, reckoning that you have only a 10% chance of actually killing anyone, and you do kill one or more of the residents, you are not guilty of murder, provided you didn't want to kill anyone but just wanted to see whether your machine gun was in working order."