Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion
In a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit DiscussionIn a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
To say that I’m indignant over this bit of news would be an understatement. I support a woman’s right to chose under any circumstances, and I find the idea that there’s not even a provision for a woman’s health to be…deplorable, to say the least.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070418/ap_on_go_su_co/scotus_abortion
Justices uphold abortion procedure ban
By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 9 minutes ago
The Supreme Court’s new conservative majority gave anti-abortion forces a landmark victory Wednesday in a 5-4 decision that bans a controversial abortion procedure nationwide and sets the stage for further restrictions.
It was a long-awaited and resounding win that abortion opponents had hoped to gain from a court pushed to the right by President Bush’s appointees.
For the first time since the court established a woman’s right to an abortion in 1973, the justices said the Constitution permits a nationwide prohibition on a specific abortion method. The court’s liberal justices, in dissent, said the ruling chipped away at abortion rights.
The 5-4 decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.
Siding with Kennedy were Bush’s two appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, along with Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
The law is constitutional despite not containing an exception that would allow the procedure if needed to preserve a woman’s health, Kennedy said. “The law need not give abortion doctors unfettered choice in the course of their medical practice,” he wrote in the majority opinion.
Doctors who violate the law could face up to two years in federal prison. The law has not taken effect, pending the outcome of the legal fight.
In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the ruling “cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this court.”
Dr. LeRoy Carhart, the Bellevue, Neb., doctor who challenged the federal ban, said, “I am afraid the Supreme Court has just opened the door to an all-out assault on” the 1973 ruling in Roe. Wade.
The administration defended the law as drawing a bright line between abortion and infanticide.
Reacting to the ruling, Bush said that it affirms the progress his administration has made to defend the “sanctity of life.”
“I am pleased that the Supreme Court has upheld a law that prohibits the abhorrent procedure of partial birth abortion,” he said. “Today’s decision affirms that the Constitution does not stand in the way of the people’s representatives enacting laws reflecting the compassion and humanity of America.”
It was the first time the court banned a specific procedure in a case over how — not whether — to perform an abortion.
Abortion rights groups as well as the leading association of obstetricians and gynecologists have said the procedure sometimes is the safest for a woman. They also said that such a ruling could threaten most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy, although Kennedy said alternate, more widely used procedures remain legal.
The outcome is likely to spur efforts at the state level to place more restrictions on abortions.
“I applaud the Court for its ruling today, and my hope is that it sets the stage for further progress in the fight to ensure our nation’s laws respect the sanctity of unborn human life,” said Rep. John Boehner (news, bio, voting record) of Ohio, Republican leader in the House of Representatives.
Jay Sekulow, a prominent abortion opponent who is chief counsel for the conservative American Center for Law and Justice, said, “This is the most monumental win on the abortion issue that we have ever had.”
Said Eve Gartner of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America: “This ruling flies in the face of 30 years of Supreme Court precedent and the best interest of women’s health and safety. … This ruling tells women that politicians, not doctors, will make their health care decisions for them.” She had argued that point before the justices.
More than 1 million abortions are performed in the United States each year, according to recent statistics. Nearly 90 percent of those occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and are not affected by Wednesday’s ruling. The Guttmacher Institute says 2,200 dilation and extraction procedures — the medical term most often used by doctors — were performed in 2000, the latest figures available.
Six federal courts have said the law that was in focus Wednesday is an impermissible restriction on a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.
“Today’s decision is alarming,” Ginsburg wrote in dissent for the court’s liberal bloc. She said the ruling “refuses to take … seriously” previous Supreme Court decisions on abortion.
Ginsburg said the latest decision “tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.”
Ginsburg said that for the first time since the court established a woman’s right to an abortion in 1973, “the court blesses a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman’s health.”
She was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer, David Souter and John Paul Stevens.
The procedure at issue involves partially removing the fetus intact from a woman’s uterus, then crushing or cutting its skull to complete the abortion.
Abortion opponents say the law will not reduce the number of abortions performed because an alternate method — dismembering the fetus in the uterus — is available and, indeed, much more common.
In 2000, the court with key differences in its membership struck down a state ban on partial-birth abortions in a challenge also brought by Carhart. Writing for a 5-4 majority at that time, Justice Breyer said the law imposed an undue burden on a woman’s right to make an abortion decision in part because it lacked a health exception.
The Republican-controlled Congress responded in 2003 by passing a federal law that asserted the procedure is gruesome, inhumane and never medically necessary to preserve a woman’s health. That statement was designed to overcome the health exception to restrictions that the court has demanded in abortion cases.
But federal judges in California, Nebraska and New York said the law was unconstitutional, and three appellate courts agreed. The Supreme Court accepted appeals from California and Nebraska, setting up Wednesday’s ruling.
Kennedy’s dissent in 2000 was so strong that few court watchers expected him to take a different view of the current case.
Kennedy acknowledged continuing disagreement about the procedure within the medical community. In the past, courts have cited that uncertainty as a reason to allow the disputed procedure.
“The medical uncertainty over whether the Act’s prohibition creates significant health risks provides a sufficient basis to conclude … that the Act does not impose an undue burden,” Kennedy said Wednesday.
While the court upheld the law against a broad attack on its constitutionality, Kennedy said the court could entertain a challenge in which a doctor found it necessary to perform the banned procedure on a patient suffering certain medical complications.
The law allows the procedure to be performed when a woman’s life is in jeopardy.
The cases are Gonzales v. Carhart, 05-380, and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood, 05-1382.
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April 19th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
Pretty soon all abortion will be outlawed. Say hello to overpopulation and families turned poor because of the extra care required (and the extra $$$).
April 21st, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Good….let’s stop crushing baby skulls and just stick with cutting their limbs off before birth…..
April 21st, 2007 at 9:21 pm
Is anyone willing to take care of all the excess babies?
April 22nd, 2007 at 8:03 am
Yeap….those unable to have children…..like Gay couples….
April 22nd, 2007 at 11:51 am
You wanna take care of all the unborn children?
May 8th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
I wonder if the writer would find sucking the brain out of infant nearly born deplorable? The ignorance of most people is what’s really deplorable. The mother’s health (as in life threatening) is never an issue in these cases. Defending that gruesome procedure is worse than deplorable. Amazing how clueless some people are…
May 12th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
Overpopulation is a serious problem. So is lack of food, water and space. If the parents don’t want the child, they can
a) Abort it
b) Leave it in a orphanage someplace and hope it survives
Children who are adopted generally grow up to be resentful of their parents and angry at the world in general. They go through the agony of wondering just what it was that made their parents leave them. I wonder if Porter finds that deplorable. I wonder if he wants to start an orphanage and rasie all the unborn babies. Amazing how clueless some people are…
May 13th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
Okay, let me get this straight…by your post….newborns that are “unwanted’ should either be killed…(how Spartan of you) or turned over to an orphanage, to be abused and ill cared for. Like all orphanages and foster, adoptive parents are abusive. Damn, I don’t believe you are THAT synickle of the world and America….
“Children who are adopted generally grow up to be resentful of their parents and angry at the world in general. They go through the agony of wondering just what it was that made their parents leave them. I wonder if Porter finds that deplorable. I wonder if he wants to start an orphanage and rasie all the unborn babies. Amazing how clueless some people are?”
Um….so, again by your standards, it best to kill babies off than have them possibly growup in a tough enviroment? Damn…ya know, why don’t you go help out the over population problem and step out in front of moving bus. That would give that much more clean air, food and water to a “more” deserving person. That’s just as well, eh? Hell, if it’s okay to kill off a baby because it could be in a tough childhood, you could save yourself a lot of issues with our tough world…
May 13th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
What? It’s obvious he was talking about having an abortion while it was still in the womb (hence the word “Abortion”)
Far be it from me to speak on The Animist’s behalf, but I’m sure he’ll agree when I say he quite clearly wasn’t talking about killing babies, he was talking about pre-birth abortion. As opposed to post-birth abortion, which you seem dead-set on twisting his words into. He’s not advocating baby killing or killing in general, leave that to the Bible (Psalms 137:9, 1 Samuel 15:3, Isaiah 13:15-18).
Advocating suicide? I really have nothing more to say to you because, frankly, I’m too disgusted with your lies, fallacies, and distortions to further this interaction except to say, please take your own advice, jump off a cliff and do it before you breed.
Though I know your type, you won’t be able to stop yourself from responding to me.
May 13th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Yes, Damen, call them out on that “newborn” thing. Even animist is referring to a fetus as a “child”. A fetus is neither a child nor a “nearly born”. It is a collection of cells that doesn’t look like anything but has a potential for growing into a human. The procedure above refers to a fetus that is past the 12 week gestation point in the second trimester.
Funny how they never talk about the mother. The mother’s life and health is never the issue. They want the fetus to get born so they can baptize it and add it to the church membership rolls, after that it’s okay if it dies. Likewise with the mother. They don’t care if the mother dies because the only important thing is that she goes to heaven, never mind leaving her children to try to grow up without a mother.
May 13th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
If the mother’s life is in danger, the fetus should be aborted. She can have more. The baby only gets one true mother.
So, Anonymous II,
1) Come out of the shadows. Think up a name for yourself.
2) Would you take in all the unwanted children? Would you? Or should that fall to the ‘innocent’ (okay, not so much) teens that were experiencing the ‘joy of sex’?
3) I’d rather push you in front of that bus.
4) I know an actual adopted child. He is a very volatile young individual, and he resents his parents very much for leaving him. I can only wonder what he will do next…
5) (Again) I’d rather push you in front of that bus.
May 13th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
(Anoymous II, known now to me as dickhead is they do not choose a name in 5 posts)
May 14th, 2007 at 8:41 am
So…you all….a fetus at 8-9 months…yeap, even 6-7 months…is not a child, deserving full protection under the law…is not a child until it fully passes thru the vigina thresh-hold? You really can’t be serious? That’s the difference between a “mass” of tissues and a human child? In inhuman bastards….
And what mother would rather save her own life than that of her child? No mother at all…just a selfish…well….i’ll be civil here…there are some women that would sacrifice their own lives for that of their own flesh and blood children….
And as for a name…Anonymous II is it…what, you sign your pay checks “Iroquois Honky” or “The Animist”….? Stupid people….
And The Animist…I have fostered a child too….grew up to be a well rounded and stable young man….so stop writing all foster and orphan children off…Or Dave Thomas will come back and haunt you tonight……
May 14th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
Bring him on…I’ll be waiting…Ya know some people attack and kill doctors who perform abortions?…Concerned about saving lives my ass…So much for Inhumane bastards…Know how annoying it is to see you type with so many periods?…
May 16th, 2007 at 10:04 am
Anonymous II knows quite well a fetus of 8-9 months is viable and would result in a live birth. With the right medical facilities, a fetus of even 20-25 weeks is able to live outside the mother’s body. This is a yet another example of the misinformation and emotionalism the anti-choice crowd uses.
Anonymous II reveals the real reason for his views–hatred of women. The “right to life” is only for blastocysts, not for Twomen. A mother who would not die for a zygote is “no mother at all”. How dare she want to “save her own life”? That’s just “selfish”. The only good mother is a dead mother. Only shapeless masses of cells have any rights; real life women are supposed to die, die, die. How dare they think they, and not the sacred fertilized clots of blood, are “life”.
There is quite a bit of empirical evidence about the socially disruptive influence of unwanted children. While I’m sure every individual behaves as an individual, as an aggregate there are measurable changes in crime statistics when a country changes its abortion laws. For example the U.S. has experienced a decrease in crime since abortion became legal. Some eastern European countries have experienced a surge in crime after their soviet-influenced governments were replaced by governments that made abortion illegal.
May 16th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
I quote Elvis Presley:
“She’s cryin’ ’cause she don’t need
yet another mouth to feed
In the ghetto,
In the ghetto.”