A victory for life! Via AP:
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.
The ruling can be read here.
Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSBlog sums up the ruling:
Dividing 5-4, the Supreme Court on Wednesday gave a sweeping — and only barely qualified — victory to the federal government and to other opponents of abortion, upholding the 2003 law that banned what are often called “partial-birth abortions.” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority in the first-ever decision by the Court to uphold a total ban on a specific abortion procedure — prompting the dissenters to argue that the Court was walking away from the defense of abortion rights that it had made since the original Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.
The Court said that it was upholding the law as written — that is, its facial language. It said that the lawsuits challenging the law should not have been allowed in court “in the first instance.” The proper way to make a challenge, if an abortion ban is claimed to harm a woman’s right to abortion, is through as as-applied claim, Kennedy wrote. His opinion said that courts could consider such claims “in discrete and well-defined instances” where “a condition has or is likely to occur in which the procedure prohibited by the Act must be used.”
Kennedy said the Court was assuming that the federal ban would be unconstitutional “if it subjected women to significant health risks.” He added, however, that “safe medical options are available.” His opinion noted that the Bush Administration “has acknowledged that pre-enforcement, as-applied challenges to the Act can be maintained.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, speaking out in the courtroom for the dissenters, called the ruling “an alarming decision” that refuses “to take seriously” the Court’s 1992 decisions reaffirming most of Roe v. Wade and its 2000 decision in Stenberg v. Carhart striking down a state partial-birth abortion law.
Ginsburg, in a lengthy statement, said “the Court’s opinion tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. For the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception protecting a woman’s health.” She said the federal ban “and the Court’s defense of it cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this Court — and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women;s lives. A decision of the character the Court makes today should not have staying power.”
Joining Kennedy in the majority were Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. With Ginsburg in dissent were Justices Stephen G. Breyer, David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens. Thus, Alito’s replacement of retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor made the difference in turning the Court around from its 2000 decision in the Stenberg case. The cases were Gonzales v. Carhart (05-380) and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood (05-1382).
Of course, the MSM, as noted in the AP piece, will run with the “conservative court” angle, without pointing to another recent USSC ruling (on the Phillip Morris case) that had ‘conservative’ justices pairing up with ‘liberal’ justices, indicating that the court may not be as motivated by partisan leanings as the media has made them out to be.
PM Update: NRO notes John Edwards statement denouncing the USSC ruling, but points to the fact that he didn’t care enough about PBA to vote on it back when he was a Senator in 2003.
Other candidates - Dem and Republican - have weighed in on the ruling. You can read what they had to say about it here.
Also, CBS is changing the way it refers to partial birth abortion:
If not for the Virginia Tech tragedy, the top story on CBSNews.com right now would likely be the decision by the Supreme Court to uphold the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. People on opposite sides of contentious issues like this often use certain terminology to try to frame the debate – see the “death tax” vs. “estate tax” argument. In this case, some, including President Bush, prefer the phrase “partial birth abortion,” while others favor “late term abortion.”
In covering the story, CBSNews.com has decided to go with this phrasing whenever possible: “what the law calls a partial birth abortion.”
Great. Another example of a news outlet trying to dumb down its viewers by not wanting to call something for what it is.
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Comment by tommy in nyc @ 4/18/2007 - 11:07 am
With the 5 conservatives voting in favor of retaining the law, and the 4 liberals voting against, I can’t imagine why the media would pick up the partisan split angle.
Comment by jpe @ 4/18/2007 - 11:20 am
I refuse to play partisan games. The procedure banned is gruesome. ‘Nuff said.
Comment by Leslie @ 4/18/2007 - 11:57 am
No tommy, a disgraceful day in American judicial history was when they ruled that states can take away your property, as in Kelo. Stopping people from murdering near term babies is not disgraceful.
Comment by Severian @ 4/18/2007 - 12:03 pm
I am sorry, tommy, but WHERE in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights does it say you are allowed to do this?
Personally I think the founding fathers would be completely disgusted with what is allowed.
Before you run off tommy, do you realize WHAT Partial Birth Abortion actually is?
It is a gruesome and disgusting procedure and I am outraged that it is even considered.
People whine and complain about torture of terrorists, and yet complain about THIS “procedure” being banned.
You want partial birth abortions, I suggest you sit through one and WATCH it from start to finish and see if you have the same damn opinion.
Same goes for any that this procedure legalized and those USSC voting for it, I say they sit down and watch the procedure too, and after they finish hurling their lunches, perhaps they may want to rethink thier position on it.
Comment by sanity @ 4/18/2007 - 12:08 pm
No Sev, it’s not “near-term”, they are actually doing a partial birth.
“A procedure where a doctor partially delivers a child’s body until only the head remains inside the womb, then punctures the back of the child’s skull with a sharp instrument, and sucks the child’s brains out before completing delivery of the now-dead infant.”
So, if it the baby is partially delivered, is it then a baby in their eyes, or still a fetus just because the doctor left the head still in?
I know the answer to it, just rhetorical, because people who support this monstrous procedure will never want their names to be associated with killing an actual baby….
Comment by sanity @ 4/18/2007 - 12:12 pm
Actually, this procedure is gruesome, but dismemberment is NOT covered and still can be used. need a visual? It is all about voting blocks, imagine people of education or Christians, even thinking this is acceptable!?
Comment by Norto @ 4/18/2007 - 1:09 pm
This is a great day in America. How this is a restriction of Tommy’s rights I can’t tell you. Tommy, you can’t have children so this has almost nothing to do with you. This is a child not a choice. Sanity has described the procedure so I don’t have to, but it is a horrible, horrible thing.
jpe again you show just how extremely left you are, to consider Justice Kennedy a conservative is like tell us Imus was a conservative. Come back to the middle abit would ya. You might gain some perspective. - Lorica
Comment by Lorica @ 4/18/2007 - 1:22 pm
One of my (few) frequent commenters continually tries to change the term to the antiseptic medical “intact dilation and extraction.” I guess it doesn’t sound quite so gruesome that way.
Comment by Dana @ 4/18/2007 - 3:52 pm
I do wonder what would happen if we took every pro-”choice” person in America, and put them in the place of the nurse described in the National Review article our wonderful hostess linked, to watch just one “intact dilation and extraction.”
Comment by Dana @ 4/18/2007 - 3:54 pm
The Iraq war and the economy aside, the appointment of those justices is Bush’s true legacy.
Comment by TedintheShed @ 4/18/2007 - 5:09 pm
OMG Could Tommy be Hillary Clinton?? I found this quote on Hillary’s Presidential website.
Drudge had a link to her statement. I wouldn’t want to link to her site from here. - Lorica
Comment by Lorica @ 4/18/2007 - 10:45 pm
Abortion is not a civil right. It is not a Constitutional right. In fact, our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, lists our “right to life” first among our “unalienable” or God-given rights. The liberal Supreme Court in 1973 knew exactly what it was doing when it decided in favor of Roe, making abortion legal in all fifty states. The liberal justices knew they were circumventing the Constitution which grants all powers to the states which are not expressly given to the federal government in the Constitution. I really hate it when people say something is a “civil right” or a “Constitutional right” when it is nothing of the kind. These people obviously have not read the Constitution. Like Rudy Guiliani who recently said that abortion is a “Constitutional right”. Excuse me, Mr. Guiliani, but you betray your ignorance by that statement. Abortion was granted by the Supreme Court, not by the Constitution or by Congress, which actually makes abortion UN-Constitutional because the Supreme Court is not granted power to make law by our Constitution. Only Congress can make law. Roe v Wade MUST be overturned just based on that alone! The end.
Comment by thecause @ 4/21/2007 - 1:08 am