The U.S. Supreme Court said Feb. 21 that it will consider the constitutionality of the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.
The court agreed to hear a Bush administration appeal of a U.S. appeals court ruling that the 2003 law is unconstitutional because it does not include an exception for the health of a pregnant woman.
Deirdre A. McQuade, spokeswoman for the U.S. bishops' Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, welcomed the court's decision to take up the case. "Partial-birth abortion is not necessary for women's physical or emotional health," she said. "Extensive testimony reveals that there is no maternal health reason why such a gruesome and inhumane procedure must be performed."
The appeal is the first abortion case the high court has agreed to hear since Justice Samuel Alito Jr. replaced Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who retired. O'Connor was often a swing vote on abortion cases and many observers regard Alito as more likely than her to favor legal restrictions on abortion.
Three federal appeals courts have found the 2003 law unconstitutional. The first such ruling came last July from the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which said that "a health exception is constitutionally required" in any law restricting abortion.
In separate rulings Jan. 31 two other appellate courts, the 9th Circuit in San Francisco and the 2nd Circuit in New York, also found the law's lack of a health exception unconstitutional.
The 9th Circuit added that the law imposes "an undue burden" on women's access to abortion and called the language of the law too vague for consistent enforcement.
In 2000 the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a state law in Nebraska banning partial-birth abortion was unconstitutional because it did not include a health exception.
O'Connor was part of the court majority in that ruling, which not only nullified the Nebraska statute but also made similar laws in a number of other states unenforceable.
The Supreme Court is to hear arguments on the federal law during its next term, which begins in October.
Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, said, "Unless the Supreme Court now reverses the extreme position that five justices took in 2000, partly born premature infants will continue to die by having theirs skulls punctured by seven-inch scissors."
In the abortion procedure banned by the federal law, after the body of the live human fetus is delivered through the mother's birth canal, the doctor pierces its skull and suctions out the brain, causing death and collapsing the head so that it may be drawn through the birth canal more easily.
When President George W. Bush signed the Partial-Birth Ban Act in November 2003, he called the procedure "a terrible form of violence ... directed against children who are inches from birth."
Abortion opponents have opposed a health exception in partial-birth abortion laws because the Supreme Court's 1973 companion abortion decision Doe v. Bolton, issued in conjunction with Roe v. Wade, defined the health rationale for an abortion to include any factor that related to a woman's well-being --- a definition so broad as to cover virtually any perceived benefit to the woman.
When the appellate court in St. Louis ruled last July that the absence of a health clause made the federal law unconstitutional, Gail Quinn, executive director of the bishops' pro-life secretariat, urged that the Supreme Court overturn that decision.
"It makes no sense to say one must kill a child who is more than half born to advance the mother's health instead of simply completing a live delivery," she said.
"There is no place in a civilized society for this cruel and dangerous practice," she said.
After the high court agreed to take up the case, McQuade commented, "Abortion advocates once said the (partial-birth abortion) procedure was rare and used only on women whose lives were in danger or whose unborn children were dying or severely disabled.
"But Ron Fitzsimmons, then executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, admitted in 1997 that partial-birth abortions are 'primarily done on healthy women and healthy fetuses,'" she said in her Feb. 21 statement. "The Alan Guttmacher Institute estimates that 2,200 abortions were performed in 2000 using this grotesque method." ---CNS |