Partial-birth abortion ban upheld
The Supreme Court blocked a similar law seven years ago.
Published April 20, 2007
In a historic reversal of precedent, The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, upheld the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 on Wednesday.
The law outlaws a type of abortion procedure known medically as "intact dilation and extraction" and known commonly as "partial-birth abortion." It is an abortion method that can be used in the second or third trimesters.
"This is a really huge win because now we have the courts acknowledging the life of an unborn child," Missouri Right To Life spokeswoman Pam Fichter said.
Seven years ago, the Supreme Court struck down a similar Nebraska law that prohibited partial-birth abortion, saying it was unconstitutional.
President George Bush's two appointees to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, provided the two votes needed to swing the court's ideology.
"The government may use its voice and its regulatory authority to show its profound respect for the life within the woman," Justice Anthony Kennedy stated in the majority opinion. "No one would dispute that. For many, D&E is a procedure itself laden with the power to devalue human life."
The act contains an exception to the ban if the woman's life is in jeopardy, which means only if the procedure is an accident or performed as an emergency, NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri Director Pamela Sumners said.
The dissenting opinion for the court disagreed with the act not providing an exemption if the pregnancy jeopardized the women's health.
The court said women could petition the court on an individual case basis if they feel their health was affected because of the ban.
"The court's allowance only of an 'as-applied challenge in a discrete case' jeopardizes women's health and places doctors in an untenable position," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stated in the dissenting opinion. "Even if courts were able to carve out exceptions through piece-meal litigation for 'discrete and well-defined instances,' women whose circumstances have not been anticipated by prior litigation could well be left unprotected."
Sumners said partial-birth abortion is rare and is mostly used when the woman's health is at stake or when there is a terrible fetal anomaly.
"I think doctors are put in a terrible position by this decision," Sumners said. "They may have to compromise their ethical duty to their patient or become criminals."
Fichter said a health exception in the law would undermine it because a previous Supreme Court decision has defined "women's health" too broadly. The Wednesday decision represents a shift in the way Americans feel about abortion, she said.
"What we've found is that the majority of people in the country oppose abortion on demand," Fichter said.
Mizzou Students for Life, an anti-abortion-rights student group, set up a "cemetery for children killed" by abortion on Wednesday, group member Maria Mahoney said.
The cemetery on Carnahan Quadrangle holds 4,000 crosses, the number of abortions Mahoney said she thinks are performed daily.
Mahoney said she helped make a similar cemetery at her previous school, Louisiana State University, but others destroyed the display and vandalized the signs.
Although abortion is still legal, Sumners said she is worried about future Supreme Court decisions.
"You would have to have no cerebellum to not be concerned about this court," she said. "It really opens the floodgates for every state legislature that is 'pro-life' to try and reverse Roe v. Wade."
