by Christine Flowers

I vowed that I would never vote for Donald Trump. I have written, at last count, seven columns explaining why he repulses me.

And yet, of course, the rest of this column will be devoted to why, barring some deus ex machina named Paul Ryan, I will vote for him in November.

Quite simply, I cannot put Hillary Clinton in a position to shape the Supreme Court.

I refuse to live in a world where women just told they can terminate their pregnancies much more easily than they can acquire a tattoo can jump around in an estrogen-filled bacchanal in front of the Supreme Court.

After I saw the reaction from abortion-rights activists on Monday morning to the decision overturning Texas laws regulating abortion clinics, I felt ill. Let’s call it “mourning sickness.”

I mourned many things, not the least of which were the children who would now never be born, because five justices on the Supreme Court decided that it was much more important that their unwilling mothers not be inconvenienced than that a medical procedure be regulated.

But more than that, because I have been wearing spiritual black for those children for over 40 years now, I mourned the death of a belief to which I had clung for those same four decades: the idea that, at heart, Americans were decent people who really could acknowledge the difference between lies of convenience, and inconvenient truths.

A columnist the other day suggested that Justice Stephen Breyer employed elegant words to send a simple message: “Don’t make s— up and expect us to buy it.” The implication was that the regulations passed by Texas were simply a dishonest way of making abortion more difficult to obtain, not safer.

Frankly, I don’t see the disconnect between those principles, because while a plurality of the court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey did hold that the government could not “unduly burden” a woman’s ability to get an abortion, there is nothing in that case or in those that followed that say, “Hey, you have to give her abortions on a silver platter.”

The issue is what burden is “undue,” and Breyer and his friends in the majority bent over backward to basically say “pretty much anything.”

Texas passed its laws in the wake of the horrific case of Kermit Gosnell. I always had the sinking suspicion that the pro-abortion voices that most loudly and stridently decried the West Philadelphia butcher’s abortion mill were really upset because of the bad PR for their beloved “fundamental right.” Nothing that happened Monday has made me change my mind.

What has changed is my determination about not voting for Donald Trump. It is not enough to not vote for Clinton. After Monday’s ruling, she tweeted about how the decision was a “victory” for women’s health. And it was then that I realized that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was clinging to her gavel until a liberal could replace her, and that the other four feminists (including Breyer and Anthony Kennedy) were in good health. Currently, the only thing standing between Clinton and the court is Trump.

I am like that animal, caught in a trap, who will do anything to survive, even if it means chewing off her paw. I am chewing off my paw by voting for the person running against Clinton. I am bleeding. But it is the only way that I can try to find my way to freedom from what is, to me, sophistry, egotism and barbarity.

CHRISTINE FLOWERS is an attorney and a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, and can be reached at cflowers1961@gmail.com.