Posted on 04/28/2008 4:36:05 PM PDT by wagglebee
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- April 18 marked the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's ruling in Gonzales v. Carhart, in which it rejected legal challenges to the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.
While opponents of the ban claimed numerous lawsuits would be brought forth to challenge the Supreme Court's ruling, thus far no challenges have been filed.
One of the four justices who dissented in the Gonzales ruling to uphold the ban, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, expressed her expectation of challenges.
She claimed they would "be mounted swiftly, to ward off serious, sometimes remediable harm, to women whose health would be endangered by the prohibition."
Ginsburg also claimed "the record already includes hundreds and hundreds of pages of testimony identifying 'discrete and well-defined instances' in which recourse to an intact D&E [partial-birth abortion] would better protect the health of women with particular conditions."
The lack of challenges in the past year sheds serious doubt on the validity of the testimony and claims of abortion advocates regarding partial birth abortion.
Edward Whelan, President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote in a recent National Review article that the ban appears safely constitutional long-term.
"In bringing an as-applied challenge, the abortion industry would have to show (in the Court's words) that, 'in discrete and well-defined circumstances, a particular condition has or is likely to occur in which the procedure prohibited by the Act must be used' to 'protect the health of the woman,'" he said.
"It hasn't dared even to try to do so," Whelan wrote.
In his article, Whelan explained that, when the Supreme Court declared a state ban on partial-birth abortion unconstitutional in the 2000 case Stenberg v. Carhart, it stated the practice could not be banned until "there exists a medical consensus that there is no circumstance in which any women could potentially benefit from it."
The 2007 ruling, however, requires that the standard rule of evidence be applied.
That the abortion industry hasn't brought lawsuit about supposed partial-birth abortions necessary to protect women's health isn't a shock to pro-life advocates.
They recall Ron Fitzsimmons, the director of a trade group of abortion businesses, who admitted "I lied through my teeth" when saying abortions were needed for health reasons.
President Bush signed the national partial-birth abortion ban into law in 2003 and abortion advocates took it to court in three separate lawsuits. Federal courts in each case relied on the Supreme Court's decision in 2000 and declared the ban unconstitutional.
In 2007, the Supreme Court reversed its 2000 decision.
The 2007 ruling indicated that the federal ban on the abortion procedure did not violate the so-called right to abortion established under Roe v. Wade.
Big Abortion is and always has been based on lies.
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Not withstanding the abortion issue, the libs who push this crap lie and create false circumstances around every issues they hold dear.
Has this circumstance, condition or loss of health ever actually been specified? I always see this vague phrase thrown around but I have yet to see a single, specific condition or circumstance described in which a partial-birth abortion is the "cure". Does anyone have a quote on it?
It DOES NOT exist.
I would think that you could probably find the transcripts, briefs and certainly opinions for Gonzales v. Carhart online. If it’s anywhere, that’s where it would be. But any argument would be, in my opinion, so far fetched as to be impossible.
And the very first lie was that it was just a “blob of tissue, not really a baby”.
And the very first lie was that it was just a “blob of tissue, not really a baby”. The very first thing that happens when someone wants to murder huge groups of people is to dehumanize them.
They seemed to have claimed that since no one could say for "certain" what might threaten the mother's life, there being no medical "consensus" in this area, anything other than a narrowly defined prohibition to the procedure would constitute an "undue burden" and thereby violate a woman's "right" to chose to have an abortion and to not be unduly impeded in the exercise of said "right" by the Government.
The original desicion placed the onus on the legislature to narrowly define what would constitute a "threat to the mothers life" whereas this most recent desicion seems to have place the onus back on the abortion provider requiring them to define what condition would place the mothers life at risk and to justify the performance of the intact D&E (partial birth abortion) as the "sole remedy" to said condition.
Not surprising --- murderers are not known for telling the truth about their murders or their intent to murder.
Yup......spin, spin, spin. Never ever call it murder, not even late term abortion.
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
Syllabus
GONZALES, ATTORNEY GENERAL v. CARHART
ET AL .
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