[Marxism] "Denying the right to choose"

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

New York Times
April 19, 2007
Editorial
Denying the Right to Choose 
Among the major flaws in yesterday's Supreme Court decision giving the
federal government power to limit a woman's right to make decisions about
her health was its fundamental dishonesty. 

Under the modest-sounding guise of following existing precedent, the
majority opinion - written by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined by Chief
Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Samuel
Alito - gutted a host of thoughtful lower federal court rulings, not to
mention past Supreme Court rulings.

It severely eroded the constitutional respect and protection accorded to
women and the personal decisions they make about pregnancy and childbirth.
The justices went so far as to eviscerate the crucial requirement, which
dates to the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, that all abortion regulations must
have an exception to protect a woman's health.

As far as we know, Mr. Kennedy and his four colleagues responsible for this
atrocious result are not doctors. Yet these five male justices felt free to
override the weight of medical evidence presented during the several trials
that preceded the Supreme Court showdown. Instead, they ratified the
politically based and dangerously dubious Congressional claim that
criminalizing the intact dilation and extraction method of abortion in the
second trimester of pregnancy - the so-called partial-birth method - would
never pose a significant health risk to a woman. In fact, the American
College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has found the procedure to be
medically necessary in certain cases.

Justice Kennedy actually reasoned that banning the procedure was good for
women in that it would protect them from a procedure they might not fully
understand in advance and would probably come to regret. This way of
thinking, that women are flighty creatures who must be protected by men,
reflects notions of a woman's place in the family and under the Constitution
that have long been discredited, said a powerful dissenting opinion by
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David
Souter and Stephen Breyer.

Far from being compelled by the court's precedents, Justice Ginsburg aptly
objected, the new ruling is so at odds with its jurisprudence - including a
concurring opinion by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (who has now been
succeeded by Justice Alito) when a remarkably similar state abortion ban was
struck down just seven years ago - that it should not have staying power. 

For anti-abortion activists, this case has never been about just one
controversial procedure. They have correctly seen it as a wedge that could
ultimately be used to undermine and perhaps eliminate abortion rights
eventually. The court has handed the Bush administration and other opponents
of women's reproductive rights the big political victory they were hoping to
get from the conservative judges Mr. Bush has added to the bench. It comes
at a real cost to the court's credibility, its integrity and the rule of
law.





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