US Supreme Court rules in favor of abortion restrictions

Reversing previous court precedents and employing shoddy legal reasoning, the court upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. That Act, basing itself on false medical conclusions and not including an exception for safeguarding the health of the pregnant woman, mandates fines and jail times of up to two years for doctors performing a type of abortion known as intact dilation and evacuation (intact D&E) or dilation and extraction (D&X). The procedure, which involves the partial extraction of the fetus before it is aborted, is employed rarely and usually only under extraordinary conditions involving the health of the mother or deformations to the fetus.

The 5-4 vote on the court overturns the decisions of three district courts and three appellate courts, which all found the act unconstitutional. The decision combined two cases before the court, Gonzales v. Carhart and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the opinion, and was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Thomas and Scalia added a separate opinion repeating their view that the court’s entire previous abortion jurisprudence, including the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade, “has no basis in the Constitution.”

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http://wsws.org/articles/2007/apr2007/abor-a19.shtml