NYT:Denying the Right to Choose

[cal04]

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 evacuation 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.

(snip)
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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/opinion/19thu1.html

[Erika]

1. The GOP SC has become the American Taliban to women

They will rule our bodies and reproductive rights. They will declare the fetus as primary in the right to life of mothers being only secondary.

They are a joke and have NO credibility.

[iamjoy]

2. I Hope "Moderate" Republicans Are Happy

This is what they get.

Funny, I'm not really angry at the rabid ones calling themselves Pro-Life. I know they don't care about the woman, just the fetus. I am furious at the moderates, the ones who call themselves Pro-Choice but supported Dubya anyway. I blame them more than the others. They made this happen.

Is that irrational?

[Erika]

3. The GOP swung far right

Republicans cared more about continued tax cuts for th rich than they did women's rights.

[snot]

4. Reminds me of when they upheld an anti-sodomy law based on their

medical judgment that homosexual sodomy causes AIDS -- at a time when it was widely known in the medical community that AIDS was readily passed by heterosexual activity as well and in the U.S. just happened to get a running start first within the gay community.

[Gloria]

5. OK, Democrats...step up to plate....except you'll run away from it

like you've doing on gun control and now, it seems, Iraq.

Losers.