Posted on 11/09/2006 5:06:25 PM PST by Graybeard58
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The graphic details of a disputed abortion procedure filled the Supreme Court on Wednesday as justices voiced concern with a federal ban on that operation.
Justices brought up uncomfortable images in sharp questions to lawyers on both sides. The issue: whether Congress was within its rights when it banned a procedure opponents call partial-birth abortion, for which there is little hard data and much disagreement.
"Wouldn't the fetus ... suffer a demise in seconds anyway?" Justice John Paul Stevens asked, focusing on the law's ban on how, rather than whether an abortion may be performed.
Solicitor General Paul Clement replied: "Well it may be seconds, it may be hours."
"Do you not agree that it has no chance of surviving, in most cases?" Stevens asked again.
In an intense morning of arguments, lawyers for the Bush administration and supporters of abortion rights gave starkly contrasting views on the practice: A law passed by Congress and signed by President Bush in 2003 labels it gruesome, inhumane and never medically necessary. Supporters argue that such abortions sometimes are the safest for women.
An anti-abortion protester in the audience began shouting midway through the first of two hours of arguments, briefly disrupting the hearing before police dragged him away.
A day after voters defeated abortion restrictions in three states, hundreds of protesters gathered in the rain outside the court. Anti-abortion advocates curled up in the fetal position along the wet sidewalk, forcing pedestrians to step over them as abortion rights groups chanted and held signs nearby.
The Bush administration is defending the law as drawing a line between abortion and infanticide.
The method involves partially extracting an intact fetus from the uterus, then cutting or crushing its skull.
Doctors most often refer to the procedure as a dilation and extraction or an intact dilation and evacuation abortion.
The procedure appears to take place most often in the middle third of pregnancy. There are a few thousand such abortions, according to rough estimates, out of more than 1.25 million abortions in the United States annually. Ninety percent of all abortions occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and are not at issue.
Six federal courts have said the law is an impermissible restriction on a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.
Clement told justices that it is significant whether "fetal demise takes place in utero or outside the mother's womb. The one is abortion, the other is murder."
Eve Gartner, arguing on behalf of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said, "What Congress has done here is take away from women the option of what may be the safest procedure for her. This court has never recognized a state interest that was sufficient to trump the women's interest in her health."
Four justices remain on the court who were part of a five-vote majority opinion that invalidated a similar Nebraska law six years ago because it lacked an exception to preserve a woman's health and encompassed a more common abortion method.
Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and Stevens all indicated they were troubled either by the federal law's lack of a health exception and its apparent disregard for a significant body of medical opinion that the procedure can be the best choice.
Justice Anthony Kennedy raised questions about the law, but also voiced concerns six years ago before he wrote an impassioned dissent saying he would have upheld the Nebraska law.
Chief Justice John Roberts appeared favorably inclined to the administration's defense of the law. He asked several times whether there was any evidence to suggest the banned abortion procedure was anything more than marginally safer than the more common dilation and evacuation method, in which a fetus is dismembered as it is removed from the uterus.
Justice Samuel Alito, hearing his first abortion arguments since joining the court earlier this year, sat silently through two hours of debate. Justice Antonin Scalia, a vocal abortion opponent, also was uncharacteristically quiet through the arguments.
Justice Clarence Thomas was out sick Wednesday, but will take part in deciding the cases, Roberts announced.
A ruling is expected before July.
The cases are Gonzales v. Carhart, 05-380, and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood, 05-1382.
Basically the issue is this. Where does abortion end and infanticide begin? That is the important part of the legislation. The act seeks to draw that line by outlawing one procedure but allowing others based on geography. Of course you know how i feel about that but the hope from the pro life perspective is incrementalism so in that regard the decision will be significant.
It all has to do with constitutional "penumbras".
Fricken lawyers.
OK, but the court seems to think that there is an alternative procedure to accomplish the same thing at the same time in the stage of fetal development, with maybe a very marginal increase in medical risk to the mother. Killing is killing, unless one things one form of killing is cruel and unusual versus another. I frankly don't get it, myself. I thought PBA was the only way to kill fetuses at such a late stage, but apparently not. If it is not, I have lost interest in the issue, as PBA qua PBA.
I'm not thrilled wit it either. I would have preferred legislation banning all late term abortion except to preserve the life of the Mom. You know, like the court held in Roe. :-}
"except to preserve the life of the Mom"
I'm all for total banning of all late term abortion.
What medical condition exists where it is necessary to dismember a baby in order to "save" the mother?
A baby can be induced to be born - this would no more stressful than a PBA or a procedure introducing sharp objects into the womb to cut the baby up.
If the mother's life is in danger, efforts can be made to save both of them.
Ah Roe, the bad jurisprudential case, which sired the subsequent Casey judicial Rosemary's Baby, as far as the Robes' fiat choice of a public policy. You know more about this issue than I do, from many perspectives; I made an erroneous tacit assumption. I hate when that happens. Those are the most dangerous assumptions of all. A more coherent and public and compelling case needs to be made against late term abortions, qua late term abortions, for some of the reasons I have stated, absent real and material physical risk which emerges to the mother. PBA was and is a deflection, it would appear. JMO.
Of course, why else would the birthing process not be allowed to proceed normally and deliver a live, healthy baby that thousands of childless couples are eagerly waiting to adopt if the mother doesn't want him or her?
This "medical procedure" is nothing less than deliberate murder with malice aforethought of an innocent, helpless baby as he or she struggles into the world and promptly gets it's head crushed for it's trouble. According to testimony before Congress by physicians who have no financial stake in the abortion mill industry, the "procedure" is very rarely, if ever, medically necessary to save the mother's life. People with a drop of normal human compassion for a helpless infant in their veins wouldn't allow that kind of inhuman cruelty to be inflicted on a puppy, much less a human baby.
I do not...cannot...comprehend such cruelty. The head is the largest part of a newborn. Once it has been delivered, what is the "danger" to the woman if the rest of the baby is born? This is nothing more than infanticide. The purpose is to make damn sure the baby is fully delivered....dead. Such cruelty is reserved to those who have some deep mental malady. I can't explain it any other way.
Several years ago Pat Buchanan was interviewing Patricia Ireland about this procedure and he was really pushing her about the baby's pain. She kept staring straight ahead and kept repeating "well, what i am concerned about is the condition of the mother blah blah blah. She never would admit that the baby feels pain. By the way, they introduced a bill a year or so ago to make it mandatory that the baby be given pain medicine before an abortion. I don't know whatever happened to the bill. I sure hope it passed.
The ACLU and PP-hood with NOW support and democrat party obstruction made sure that bill never made it to a vote because to admit the alive child in the womb feels pain is to at once admit that the child is a human being and the killing of that child is murder of a helpless human being. The state sponsored medical program in England has adopted such forced methodology though, but I do not remember what is their 'cut off' age before which no pain meds are required to dismember the child.
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