They're gonna make someone pay for their "culture of life"

The General points us to a legal case so distasteful, it can only have been hatched in the fever brains of the Bush Justice Department.

When she learned that she was carrying a baby with almost no brain and no chance of survival, a devastated young Navy wife from Everett pleaded with a federal court in Seattle to force her military medical program to pay for an abortion.

"I could not imagine going through five more months of pregnancy, knowing that the baby will never survive or have any kind of life whatsoever," the woman, then 19, told a federal judge in August 2002. "I understand that even if the baby is born alive, it will probably die after it takes a few breaths. I am really terrified of the prospect of giving birth, then watching the baby die."

She won her case and had the abortion. But more than two years later, the federal government continues to fight her, trying to get the woman and her sailor husband to pay back the $3,000 the procedure cost and trying to cast in stone a ban on government-funded abortions.

The case of Jane Doe. v. the United States will be argued before a federal appeals court next month. Like the Terri Schiavo case in Florida, involving a severely brain-damaged adult, this matter involves questions of what is human life, when can family decide to end it and how far can the government go to block that decision.

Federal lawyers have aggressively appealed the Navy wife's case, often using moral arguments against abortion. The case focuses on the Hyde Amendment regulations, which forbid use of public funds for abortions except if a mother's life is endangered, or in cases of incest or rape -- but not for lethal fetal ailments.

After a lengthy tug of war in which Jane Doe's case bounced between two courts of appeal, on the East and West coasts, arguments will be heard April 6 before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is based in San Francisco. (Editor's Note: The original version of this story contained an incorrect court date.)

"It's a sleeper case that no one is talking about because it's so far from over, but when it hits, it's going to be a big one," predicted Maureen Britell, former executive director of the now-defunct Voters for Choice lobby in Washington, D.C.

What makes this even more enraging, our great moralist and "I'm not a neurologist, but I play one on TV," Doctor Frist, had a strong point-of-view on anencephalic babies 16 years ago.

Frist wrote a book in 1989 called Transplant where he advocated changing the definition of "brain dead" to include anencephalic babies. Anencephalic babies are in the same state as Terri Schiavo except that she suffered a physical trauma that put her into a vegetative state while the anencephalic babies are born that way.

This remarkable discovery buttresses the argument that Frist's advocacy for Schiavo is wholly political. How does he explain this remarkable inconsistency? Here is the relevant passage on Frist as quoted by the New Republic in 2003:

"And, although Frist writes frequently about the ethical issues surrounding transplants--for example, the question of when death begins--he approaches these issues in starkly scientific terms, with little patience for religious objections.

"Near the end of the book, for example, Frist suggests changing the legal definition of 'brain death' to include anencephalic babies, who are born with a fatal neurological disorder but show just the slightest hint of brain-stem activity. Such a change would make it possible to harvest their organs for transplant--something the Catholic Church and pro-life groups oppose. 'Three thousand anencephalic babies were born a year, enough to solve our demand many times over--but we never used them.'"

So many things at play, hypocricy, forcing the poor to pay for someone else's strident moral values, political machinations, and on and on.

Oh, and Henry Hyde.