Troubling Implications Seen in Abortion Ban

This law was actually passed four years ago, and the Supreme Court just gave it their stamp. Many will be worried that this will be the slippery slope that will ultimately lead to a full ban.

[q
url="http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/04/18/scotus.abortion/index.html?eref=rss_topstories"]The
sharply divided 5-4 ruling could prove historic. It sends a possible
signal of the court's willingness, under Chief Justice John Roberts, to
someday revisit the basic right to abortion guaranteed in the 1973 Roe
v. Wade case.

At issue is the constitutionality of a federal law banning a rarely
performed type of abortion carried out in the middle-to-late second
trimester.

The legal sticking point was that the law lacked a "health
exception" for a woman who might suffer serious medical complications,
something the justices have said in the past is necessary when
considering abortion restrictions.

In the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy, the key swing vote
in these divided appeals, said the federal law "does not have the
effect of imposing an unconstitutional burden on the abortion right."
He was joined by his fellow conservatives, Justices Antonin Scalia,
Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Roberts.

Sole woman on bench reads bitter dissent

In a bitter dissent read from the bench, Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg, the only woman on the high court, said the majority's opinion
"cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away a
right declared again and again by this court, and with increasing
comprehension of its centrality to women's lives."

She called the ruling "alarming" and noted the conservative majority
"tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a
procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases" by doctor's
groups, including gyncecologists.

The Justice Department and abortion rights groups have offered
differing views of the legislation's impact on women's overall second
trimester access to the procedure, and whether the procedure is ever
medically necessary.

This was the first time the high court had heard a major abortion
case in six years, and since then, its makeup has changed, with Roberts
and Alito now on board.

Their presence on the bench provided the solid conservative majority
needed to allow the federal ban to go into effect, with Kennedy
providing the key fifth vote for a majority.

Alito replaced Sandra Day O'Connor, a key abortion rights supporter over her quarter century on the bench.

Doctors call this type of late-term abortion an "intact dilation and
evacuation." Abortion foes term it a "partial-birth abortion."

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It will be interesting to hear the presidential hopefuls' reactions to this.

DISCLOSURE: I am pro-choice: old white guys in Washington are, in my opinion, in no position to legislate on the management of womens' bodies: they are passing laws whose effects will never reach them. I trust docotrs more than I trust policy wonks, hence my stance.