In Other News
Court Backs Ban on Abortion Procedure
By MARK SHERMAN
The Associated Press
Wednesday, April 18, 2007; 10:30 AM
WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court upheld the nationwide ban on a controversial abortion procedure Wednesday, handing abortion opponents the long-awaited victory they expected from a more conservative bench.The 5-4 ruling said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.
The opponents of the act "have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.
The decision pitted the court's conservatives against its liberals, with President Bush's two appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, siding with the majority.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia also were in the majority.
It was the first time the court banned a specific procedure in a case over how _ not whether _ to perform an abortion.
Abortion rights groups have said the procedure sometimes is the safest for a woman. They also said that such a ruling could threaten most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy, although government lawyers and others who favor the ban said there are alternate, more widely used procedures that remain legal.
As I do with all legal matters, I went over to Talk Left for commentary. Big Tent Democrat points out a section of Justice Ginsberg's dissent:
One wonders how long a line that saves no fetus will hold in the face of the Court's "moral concerns." . . . The Court's hostility to the right Casey and Roe secured is not concealed. Throughout, the opinion refers to obstetrician-gynecologists not by the title of their medical specialties, but by the pejorative label "abortion doctors."
The line laid down here is pretty clear: if a challenge to Casey or Roe comes before this court, those precedents are going down. And this decision is an engraved invitation for those cases to be brought.
Comments
As Bush himself has said, elections have consequences. The image burned in my brain from November 2004 is that London tabloid paper's headline "How can 65M people be so dumb?"
Posted by: Linkmeister | April 18, 2007 03:09 PM
Not the best quote of her dissent. This thing saying "unconstitutional in a large fraction" turns out to be interesting. It seems that in an attempt to throw red meat to the base the Republicans were bending over backwards.
I think they are reversing prior precedent on a particular aspect of how these types of cases are judged. They are admiting that the proceedure is probably medically necessary for some cases which is normally the end of it. But then they say that for any other kind of decision congress would be allowed to rule that some fact, even medical fact, was true when it wasn't with some latitude because the appropriate redress is to wait for someone to be wronged by the law and then challenge it -- rather than, as here, to challenge the law before anyone has been effected by it.
However with abortions you can hardly expect an individual to go through a legal challenge when their specific circumstances are known, before having the abortion, so it's never been subject to those stricter rules before.
Most likely then the law will eventually be overturned on the basis of its lack of exception for the health of the mother. The Republicans just refused to say right now what they in fact accept in theory still -- that this law will be found unconsitutional.
They appear to have broken with precedent to give their base a faux result.
Posted by: DavidByron | April 19, 2007 05:18 PM