USSC upholds ban on partial birth abortion (MORE: EDWARDS CARES ABOUT PBA NOW, BUT NOT IN 2003)
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.