You might remember Michigan judge Elizabeth L. Gleicher, who by her own account “makes yearly contributions to Planned Parenthood of Michigan,” “represented [plaintiffs challenging an informed-consent law*] as a volunteer attorney for the ACLU in 1996-1997, in Mahaffey v. Attorney General,” and “received the Planned Parenthood Advocate Award” in 1998.

Back in May, Judge Gleicher issued a preliminary injunction in favor of … Planned Parenthood of Michigan that barred the Michigan attorney general from enforcing Michigan’s pre-Roe law on abortion. And in the course of doing so, she distinguished away the Mahaffey case in which she had advocated that there is a right to abortion under the state constitution—and lost.

Well, yesterday Gleicher continued her rampage, as she granted Planned Parenthood of Michigan a permanent injunction against Michigan’s pre-Roe law. That law, Gleicher rules, violates a right to bodily integrity that a Michigan appellate court has held to be encompassed by the state constitution’s Due Process Clause, and it also violates the state constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

If you think that the role of a judge is to disguise the Left’s moral preferences in constitutional garb, you might like Gleicher’s ruling. I’ll limit myself to noting a few of its features.

Gleicher maintains that the “primary purpose” of Michigan’s pre-Roe law “was the protection of maternal health,” and she contends that her opinion in May “demonstrated” that. That’s a surprising and implausible claim, and I see nothing in her May opinion that even attempts to support it.

Gleicher asserts, “Fifty years of conflict regarding Roe have proven that consensus regarding when life begins is impossible.” But there is a scientific consensus that the life of a human being beings at conception, and there is no plausible alternative view. Gleicher is confusing the scientific question with the moral or philosophical question when a human being has a right to life. Worse, Gleicher somehow leaps to the conclusion that the supposed lack of consensus entitles her to impose her view that Michigan can’t bar abortion “before fetal viability.”

Gleicher even quotes with approval a recent assertion by Larry Tribe that laws against abortion force a pregnant woman to serve as “an involuntary vessel entitled to no more respect than other forms of collectively owned property.”

In its 1997 decision in Mahaffey, the Michigan court of appeals broadly “conclude[d] that neither application of traditional rules of constitutional interpretation nor examination of [Michigan] Supreme Court precedent supports the conclusion that there is a right to abortion under the Michigan Constitution.” Noting that “abortion was a criminal offense” when the state constitution was adopted in 1963, it stated:

Thus, we must presume that the drafters of the 1963 constitution were aware of the statutory prohibition against abortion. The fact that the 1963 constitution itself and the debates of the Constitutional Convention preceding the adoption of the constitution are silent regarding the question of abortion indicates that there was no intention of altering the existing law. We believe that the addition of a fundamental right to abortion to the constitution “would have been such a marked change in the law as to elicit major debate among the delegates to the Constitutional Convention as well as the public at large.” Furthermore, less than ten years after the adoption of the constitution, essentially the same electorate that approved the constitution rejected a proposal brought by proponents of abortion reform to amend the Michigan abortion statute. Under these facts, we cannot conclude that the intent of the people that adopted the 1963 constitution was to establish a constitutional right to abortion. [Emphasis added; citations omitted.]

Gleicher does not acknowledge, much less address, that her own reasoning is in stark conflict with the court of appeals’ reasoning in Mahaffey.

It’s quite a trick for Gleicher to have reversed her own loss in Mahaffey 25 years ago. Planned Parenthood of Michigan should give her another Planned Parenthood Advocate Award.

* Gleicher initially informed the parties that she represented Planned Parenthood of Michigan in Mahaffey.