I'm minding my own business, visiting a few hundred blogs in an effort to complete the database on Bioethics Internet resources for my Bioethics capstone project, and one of the headlines said that the Supreme Court had up held the Federal ban on Partial Birth Abortions.
There was no earthquake, no sonic boom, and I might have slept through the whole thing!
It appears that Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion for the majority.
Watch the National Review "Bench" blog for the analysis. (And FreeRepublic for the people's reaction.)
As I said, the world didn't end, and this ruling evidently specifically did not rule on Roe v. Wade, the legitimacy of the Court's ruling on abortion, or even overturn Carhart, the previous Supreme Court case on partial birth abortion.
Justice Ginsburg, at least, wrote a dissent predicting the end of the world for women.
I expect the conversation to get ugly.
The procedure that intentionally delivers part of a child in the second or third trimester in order to decrease the needed dilation of the mother's cervix by reducing the size of the skull is a particularly barbaric example of abortion. I believe that only the extreme pro-abortion advocates (those who see any restrictions as placing the entire elective abortion "right" at risk) are truly supportive of this procedure.
Those who are so pro-abortion as to see this ban as "the end of the world," shouldn't worry: there will still hysterotomies, saline abortions and multiple ways of killing the child in utero.
(There may be a shortage of fetal tissues for research, however.)
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
And the world didn't end (Supreme Court Partial Birth Ruling)
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Very few people support the procedure itsself - I have yet to find even one. But a lot of pro-choice campaigners were strongly opposed to the law purely because of its legal implications.
Had the ban included a usable health exception, then there would have been almost no resistance to it. But the lack of such an exception was fully intentional - its just another piece in the game of politics and law. It hasn't overturned Rowe, but it is a significent weakening, as intended.
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