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The Choice
By Doug Patton
March 4, 2002

Your Honor... Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury... I come before you today to give you my opening remarks and to state the case the defense intends to prove.

There has been a great deal of controversy surrounding this case. It has brought to the fore every element of society with every form of opinion imaginable. There are those who believe my client is legally insane. Others believe she is a monster who should be put to death for her deeds. Still others have sympathy for her condition at the time she made her fateful decision, yet can't quite grasp the motivation for her actions.

Andrea Yates may very well be insane. In fact, our defense will include this contention. Her mental state at the time of the incident needs to be examined. There can be little doubt that the stress placed on her by her motherhood was a serious contributing factor to her actions.

This leads us to the real crux of our case, for it is on another point of law that the defense will make its strongest arguments, arguments that we hope will go to the very highest court in the land for review, in order to expand a precedent already well established in our law.

Our argument is this: when Andrea Yates terminated the children of her own womb, she was merely exercising her constitutional right to privacy and reproductive choice as guaranteed by the United States Supreme Court in 1973, under the provisions of the cases commonly known as Roe versus Wade and Doe versus Bolton. You will note that every decision rendered by the high court since that time has given American women the latitude to terminate a pregnancy for the sake of her physical and mental health. The defense intends to argue that Andrea Yates' actions were well within those bounds.

Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, the defense intends to follow the case law that established the constitutional right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy, and present it in its purest, most elementary form. We also intend to file a lawsuit charging that the State of Texas violated Mrs. Yates right to privacy by entering her home and arresting her for murder.

I know these ideas may seem strange, but don't forget that a woman's right to choose is only in its thirtieth year, her right to vote a little over eighty years old. All case law pushes the envelope of what is acceptable to society, and this case is no exception.

I can already see the disgust on the faces of several jurors. That's okay. This is America, and you are entitled to your opinion. What you are not entitled to is the right to impose your morality on my client, a confused woman merely exercising her right to decide whether or not she wanted to continue to raise the children of her own body.

For those of you who appear to have made up your minds on this case, I ask you to just sit back, listen to the oral arguments that will be placed before you for your consideration, and then render your verdict based on what you have heard.

After all, we have already taken the bounds of acceptable termination right up to the moment of birth with a medical procedure known as intact dilation and extraction - or D and X for short. Anti-choice activists have renamed this vitally necessary procedure "partial-birth abortion." In this operation, the fully formed fetus is pulled feet-first into the birth canal, at which time the doctor inserts scissors into the base of the skull. The cranial cavity is then evacuated, thereby completing the procedure. Two years ago, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling, in the case of Carhart versus Stenberg, that the State of Nebraska had no authority to prohibit - or even limit - this procedure.

I should also point out that the State of Oregon has already put us well on the road toward euthanasia of the elderly and the infirm by passing the nation's first physician-assisted suicide law. Hawaii is currently considering the same type of legislation.

Finally, the defense will introduce the expert testimony of Dr. Peter Singer. Dr. Singer is the Ira DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University's Center for Human Values. This preeminent scholar will present expert testimony on the subject at hand. Dr. Singer's views are shocking to some, visionary to others, but in his groundbreaking book, Practical Ethics, Dr. Singer asserts the appropriateness of terminating the lives of some human beings based on another's decision concerning the quality of their lives.

And in the final analysis, isn't that exactly what Andrea Yates did? She exercised a choice. No more, no less.