Pro-Life Groups Rejoice While Grim Reality Sets In
By Katherine Heflin '07
News Staff Reporter
The Supreme Court anti-abortion ruling on Wednesday, April 18th, has more dangerous and devastating implications than any of its defenders can comprehend. From the justices who signed the majority opinion to the pro-life organizations that praised their decision, the many people who support this ban do not know the grim reality of what has actually occurred. Although the specific number of women who have resorted to the now-banned method in their third trimester of pregnancy is small, the implications of the Supreme Court ruling are enormous.
There are alternatives to the criminalized intact dilation and extraction method (which the partisan-based bill refers to as “partial birth abortion”). Yet a number of doctors feel most comfortable with this method. If they cannot use it, as they now cannot, they will have to perform a procedure in which they are less accurate and more prone to make life-threatening mistakes. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists adds that, in many cases, intact dilation and extraction is the “safest and offers significant benefits for women suffering from certain conditions.” These certain conditions “make non-intact D& E especially dangerous,” says Gina Kolata, a reporter for The New York Times. Conditions like these, which doctors but not politicians and judiciaries can comprehend, are a fine example of why the government should refrain from entering and ignorantly policing the medical realm.
Constitutionally, many argue, Congress cannot regulate medicine unless it is considered interstate commerce. The thought that medicine could be analogous to agriculture— even when using the argument that some tools, patients, and doctors cross state lines—is an illogical stretch. Although vague ideas about medical practices have passed through the Court before, the “partial birth abortion” case is different in character because of its reference to one specific procedure. Congress clearly overstepped its Constitutional powers in this case, and the Supreme Court failed to check it.
The Supreme Court disregarded lower federal court rulings made on the issue, and even threw out the window the 1973 ruling on Roe v. Wade, which required abortion regulations to allow exceptions in order to protect the health of the woman. Under the upheld ban, a doctor must decided if the woman’s life in danger; if only her health is on the line when he performs the dilation and extraction, the doctor can be sent to jail. This puts extreme and unnecessary pressure on doctors, asking them to make sure she is about to die, and if they miscalculate in either direction, they face a killing an innocent patient, or spending time in jail for insuring her safety. The emphasis has switched from the well-being of the woman to the consequences for the fetus, leaving the woman’s potential death the only other repercussion considered.
No more comforting than this “rock and a hard place” condition, the reasoning of the majority’s written case reveals bigotry and sexism. Justice Kennedy claimed that upholding this ban was good for women—that it would protect them from something they probably did not fully understand (as though he himself did) and that their actions without the ban would most likely cause them regret after it was too late. It seemed that our society was past the despicable generalizations that women are erratic and in need of direction from men, but apparently this is not true of dinosaurs like Justice Kennedy. The majority opinion’s chauvinistic implications alone are enough to anger the females of America.
Perhaps the worst outcome of this verdict is that it has set a precedent for future abortion rulings. Thanks to appointments made by President Bush, the bench has become more conservative than it has been in decades. The precedent that the “partial birth abortion” decision has set is multifaceted. First, it has changed the way in which abortion is allowed to be discussed by the US government. Rather than speaking in terms of privacy, the debate consisted of small parts of the specific procedure, defining what ‘fully informed consent’ meant, and whether a fetus feels pain. These abstract, ambiguous topics, not pertaining to law or the constitution, are now legitimate areas of argument for legislators and judiciaries when debating the controversial topic of abortion.
The justices now seem to say that specific restrictions on abortion are constitutional, defying past precedent: the Supreme Court has never upheld any prohibition on a specific type of abortion. This ruling could supply lawmakers and pro-life advocates new energy to push for further restrictions, which under the radical new precedent can easily be upheld.
A colossal misstep has been taken, which not only undermines the integrity and legitimacy of the current Supreme Court, but also causes innocent practicing doctors and patients varying degrees of anguish, ranging from jail time to the pregnant woman’s unnecessary death. Worst of all, it threatens the important 1973 decision that guaranteed America the right to reproductive privacy and left the world of medicine in the hands of the medical experts.
