SCOTUS Upholds Partial Birth Abortion Ban
A true victory for those who recognize abortion as an abhorrent violation of an unborn child’s rights.
WASHINGTON (CNN) --The Supreme Court Wednesday upheld a controversial congressional law banning a specific abortion procedure critics call “partial birth,” a ruling that could portend enormous social, legal, and political implications for the divisive issue.
The sharply divided 5-4 ruling could prove historic, and offer a possible signal of the new Roberts court’s willingness to someday revisit the basic right to abortion guaranteed in the 1973 Roe v. Wade case.
At issue now is the constitutionality of a federal law banning a type of abortion typically performed by doctors 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
Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia and Kennedy were the majority. Predictably, the liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Paul Stevens, David Souter and Stephen Breyer were the dissenters.
Here’s more from Reuters:
The upheld law makes it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion when the “entire fetal head” or “any part of the fetal trunk past the navel” is outside the woman’s uterus.
The procedure, which often occurs in the second trimester of pregnancy, is known medically as intact dilation and extraction.
This was the proper decision. The idea that a child, pulled partially from its mother’s womb put he/she mere inches from living completely separate from her body, can be killed simply because the mother doesn’t want it or bringing it to term might put her health at risk is ridiculous. To believe that it isn’t ridiculous is to believe that there is some fundamental difference between a child immediately before emerging from the womb that makes it “not a person” as compared to the same child immediately after it has emerged from the womb.
Which is such an arbitrary, absurd distinction that the people making it should be ridiculed for the doofuses they are. But they insist that we respect them and champion their cause. Because they’re fighting for, uh, “women’s rights” or something.
