Supreme Court Upholds Abortion Procedure Ban
See here. I think this decison is a step backward for women's equality and for medicine, though its advocates strongly feel otherwise. There was reason to think the banned procedure might have been safer in some cases. It ought not to be the government's role to use any perceived ambiguity about that judgment to make decisions about a woman's medical care regardless of her will.
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That's because this isn't about medicine. It's about religion.
I don't even think it's about this specific procedure, as cruel and horrible as it does indeed sound. This is simply a stepping-stone, a milepost on the way to completely criminalizing abortion.
The consequences of making abortions illegal seem to me way worse than what we have today.
Dissent Protects Democracy.
April 18, 2007 12:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
It didn't take long to find something to backup what I just said:
Dissent Protects Democracy.
April 18, 2007 12:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Advocates of outlawing abortion may regard this decision, or want to regard it, as a step toward the banning of more abortions or indeed all abortions, but I'd say they are unlikely to get their way soon. Justice Kennedy, author of today's decision, is nonetheless a supporter of Roe v. Wade. So there's still a 5-4 majority, at worst, in support of the core constitutional right. (Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito have not directly weighed in on this question.) Any further appointments by President Bush of Roe opponents would be unlikely to be confirmed by a Democratically controlled Senate.
April 18, 2007 12:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
That is hardly true. Identifying the legal issues and outcomes in the case by who cheers for the outcome is not a reasonable discussion of the case. It is an obfuscation of the case's content.
April 18, 2007 1:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Physicians I've spoken with have told me that D&E as PBA is never necessary. That's expert witnessing, and anecdotal from here, but it means something to me. Disclosure: I think abortion is itself a taking of a life, whatever the justifications or rationalizations.
Viability is also an arbitrary standard. Why is it the case that when a child in the womb is viable, that it is not also solely an issue of a woman's medical care to get an abortion, but that another human life has been deemed present such that its interests are within the State's interest to protect? That's Roe, isn't it?
Why the arbitrary distinction?
I have always percieved in the "women's control over her body" and "medical care for a woman" arguments a sort of replacement terminology that skews the conversation away from the parent-child-family context including the woman and mother's health.
The political interests that do this seem to preserve abortion emphasize women as non-relational persons asserting rights in a vacuum.
In any case, where mom's life is at stake by going through with the pregnancy, nearly all rightist partisans say that is and should be an exception to an abortion proscription.
Partial birth abortion does not seem as important to the pro-abortion lobby as a medical care procedure versus its use as a political tool to buffer all abortions from restrictions, which abortions which create jobs, further lobbying funds, generate revenues, and keep people working in the pro-abortion field.
April 18, 2007 1:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
"pro-abortion lobby"?
I think many people are against abortion, but still respect and uphold a woman's right to choose what happens to her body.
That's why they call themselves "pro-choice."
April 18, 2007 2:49 PM | Reply | Permalink