To The Rear Face !

For those of y'all that thought laws were sealed in stone.
Better think again cause the U.S. Supreme Court has just
reversed itself on a decision that was made in 2000. This
is scary in that this ruling is a major departure of past rulings
on the abortion issue. Read the story below from the New
York Times and please serve up your comments.


The Supreme Court narrowly upheld a federal law today banning a controversial abortion procedure, giving the anti-abortion movement one of its biggest legal victories in years.
The justices ruled, 5 to 4, that a law passed by Congress in 2003 and signed by President Bush does not violate the Constitution by imposing an undue burden on a woman’s right to end a pregnancy. The majority said its ruling reflects the government’s “legitimate, substantial interest in preserving and promoting fetal life.”

“The act, on its face, is not void for vagueness and does not impose an undue burden from any overbreadth,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court, rejecting key arguments of the law’s opponents. The majority upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, whose very name can set off heated debate. The procedure addressed is known medically as “intact dilation and evacuation” and “D and X,” for dilation and extraction. It involves partly removing an intact fetus, then destroying the skull to complete the abortion. Doctors and other abortion-rights advocates who challenged the law maintained that the procedure is often the safest because it minimizes the chances of injury to the uterus.

The majority said that the 2003 law would not affect most abortions, which are performed early in a pregnancy; that the law does not encourage “arbitrary or discriminatory enforcement,” and that alternatives to the prohibited procedure are available. Justice Kennedy was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the majority decision “alarming” and a retreat from the court’s earlier holdings. “It 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,” Justice Ginsburg wrote, in a dissent joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer.

The ruling overturned findings of several lower federal courts that had found the 2003 law unconstitutional. Today’s ruling is also a change of course from a Supreme Court ruling in 2000, when the lineup of justices was different, striking down a Nebraska law banning the procedure.
Justice Ginsburg was so disappointed in today’s ruling that she took the highly unusual step of reading part of her dissent from the bench.





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