Federal Court overturns restrictive Michigan abortion law

From Medical News Today:

A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati on Monday upheld a lower court decision that declared unconstitutional a Michigan law banning so-called 'partial-birth' abortions, ruling the law poses an 'undue burden' on women seeking the procedure, the New York Times reports (Sander, New York Times, 6/5).

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Reproductive Rights and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in March 2005 filed suit in federal court to prevent enforcement of the state law, known as the Legal Birth Definition Act, which would have changed the legal definition of birth to the first moment any part of a fetus is outside a woman's body. The measure, which became law in June 2004, was scheduled to take effect on March 30, 2005, but U.S. District Judge Denise Page Hood approved a temporary restraining order preventing it from being enforced.

Hood in her ruling called the law confusing and vague and said its exceptions for the health or life of a mother are irrelevant and unconstitutional. ...

The three-judge panel ruled that the Michigan law is broader than a federal law (S 3), upheld in April by the U.S. Supreme Court, and that the state law potentially could apply to abortions using other methods earlier in pregnancy, the Detroit Free Press reports....

Judge Boyce Martin, writing for the court, said the Michigan Legislature took a "dragnet approach" to regulating the procedure and "showed no meaningful attempt to comply with the constitutional limitations articulated by federal courts in the area of abortion law."

Docs doing, learning abortions

Broadsheet -From Salon.com:

... the Los Angeles Times reports that for every abortion-rights setback, new medical students step up to buck the trend. 'For them,' the article says, 'doing abortions is an act of defiance -- a way of pushing back against mounting restrictions on a right they've taken for granted all their lives.'"...

"Most medical schools barely mention the subject and it's rarely included in ... residencies," says the article. "Just half the nation's obstetrics-gynecology residencies -- and only 20 out of 400 family practice residencies -- integrate abortion into physician training, according to Lois Backus, executive director of Medical Students for Choice. Most residents interested in the field must study on their own, often through after-hours electives in abortion clinics."

"They have to be enormously committed to work it in..."

Letters to the Editor--from a NARAL primer

NARAL Pro-Choice Texas: Letters to the Editor:

To the Editor, re 'A Sharp Turn for the Supreme Court on Abortion' (letters, April 20):

I am a rheumatologist caring for a patient whose lupus nephritis is flaring. Her creatinine is rising as her platelet count falls, and she has failed to improve with pulse methylprednisolone and intravenous cyclophosphamide. I am contemplating using rituximab. I would like to refer this case to the United States Supreme Court for its guidance.
Richard Zweig, M.D.
Santa Rosa, Calif., April 20, 2007

(Letter to the editor printed in the New York Times after the Supreme Court's April 18, 2007 ruling on the Federal Abortion Ban)

I missed this first time around, but am pleased to recirculate now.

New Abortion Bill To Require Fetal Consent

New Abortion Bill To Require Fetal Consent | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
New Abortion Bill To Require Fetal Consent

I love the smell of sliming blogs in the morning

The Opinionator - New York Times Blog:

Maybe Giuliani has an outside chance at the G.O.P. nomination, but could a pro-choice Republican win the general election? The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat doesn’t think so: “Frankly, if Giuliani being the Republican nominee doesn’t prompt a third-party run by a pro-life candidate that cuts into his general-election support, then social conservatives ought to retire from politics out of sheer embarrassment.”

Giuliani isn’t the only Republican candidate whose candidacy is suffering because of an abortion-related controversy. One prominent conservative blogger ruled out supporting Mitt Romney after learning that Romney’s wife, Ann, gave $150 to Planned Parenthood in 1994. “It is not because Ann Romney gave money to Planned Parenthood,” writes Erick Erickson at RedState. “It is because this is the straw that broke the camel’s back — one light piece of straw piled on a mountain of political opportunism and reckless vacillation.”

Giuliani to Support Abortion Rights

From The New York Times:

After months of conflicting signals on abortion, Rudolph W. Giuliani is planning to offer a forthright affirmation of his support for abortion rights in public forums, television appearances and interviews in the coming days, despite the potential for bad consequences among some conservative voters already wary of his views, aides said yesterday....
Mr. Giuliani’s aides were concerned both because the responses [to his performance in the recent Republican "debate"] opened him up to a new round of criticism from abortion critics, who have never been happy with the prospect of a Republican presidential candidate who supports abortion rights, while threatening to undercut his image as a tough-talking iconoclast who does not equivocate on tough issues.

Indeed, "a tough-talking iconoclast who does not equivocate" on following his political strategists and their positioning advice.

Pope Opens Trip With Remarks Against Abortion

ALSO SAYS HE'S CATHOLIC?
From The New York Times:

The Brazilian church’s senior cleric, Cardinal Geraldo Majella Agnelo, also condemned government policies on reproductive health, which have won praise from international public health groups. He singled out sexual education and condom-distribution programs, which have helped cut AIDS transmission rates.
“This is inducing everyone into promiscuity..."

Supreme Confusion : Interesting for its source

I am no great fan of Reagan Solicitor General Charles Fried, and disagree with him on virtually all controversial matters of public consequence. Fried strongly supported the nominations of Justices Roberts and Alito. Which makes his comments here interesting:
From The New York Times: By Charles Fried

Justice Anthony Kennedy’s decision for the court in the abortion case last week does not change my mind, because the procedure that was banned, intact dilation and extraction, is too rarely used and its importance too dubious to make much difference.

Still, this most recent decision is disturbing, because in 2000, in a similar case, the Supreme Court struck down a Kansas partial birth abortion ban. The Kansas law was unacceptably vague, but the principal reason for the court’s earlier decision was that there was responsible medical opinion that sometimes the procedure was less risky for the mother, and therefore in such cases the ban posed an undue burden. The federal ban cured the vagueness, but sought to overcome the medical testimony by a legislative proclamation of a fact that is not a fact: that the procedure was never safer for the mother.

The decision is disturbing because the court has on numerous occasions refused to allow Congress to overturn constitutional law by bogus fact finding, notably in decisions invalidating the Violence Against Women Act (which Justice Kennedy joined) and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (which Justice Kennedy wrote).

It’s disturbing because Justice Kennedy fails to come to grips with his own jurisprudence, going so far as to say that because Congress was acting under its power to regulate interstate commerce, it needed only a rational basis to justify its decision. Where a fundamental right is involved, such an explanation is evidently wrong.

Does This Abortion Decision Matter? - The Opinionator - Opinion - New York Times Blog

Here is a collection of blog commentaries on the recent abortion decision. One theme:

It matters who is on the Court - 5 Catholic men voting against Roe? How could anyone be surprised, they are doing what they were put there to do.

Does This Abortion Decision Matter? - The Opinionator - Opinion - New York Times Blog:

Gonzales v. Carhart--Link to Text of New Abortion Opinion

From the dissent:

Today's decision is alarming. It refuses to take Casey and Stenberg seriously. It 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 (ACOG). It blurs the line, firmly drawn in Casey, between previability and postviability abortions. And, for the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman's health.

I dissent from the Court's disposition. Retreating from prior rulings that abortion restrictions cannot be imposed absent an exception safeguarding a woman's health, the Court upholds an Act that surely would not survive under the close scrutiny that previously attended state-decreed limitations on a woman's reproductive choices.

Clarifying a new direction of analysis (unfortunately, in dissent):

As Casey comprehended, at stake in cases challenging abortion restrictions is a woman's "control over her [own] destiny." 505 U. S., at 869 (plurality opinion). See also id., at 852 (majority opinion).2 "There was a time, not so long ago," when women were "regarded as the center of home and family life, with attendant special responsibilities that precluded full and independent legal status under the Constitution." Id., at 896-897 (quoting Hoyt v. Florida, 368 U. S. 57, 62 (1961)). Those views, this Court made clear in Casey, "are no longer consistent with our understanding of the family, the individual, or the Constitution." 505 U. S., at 897. Women, it is now acknowledged, have the talent, capacity, and right "to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation." Id., at 856. Their ability to realize their full potential, the Court recognized, is intimately connected to "their ability to control their reproductive lives." Ibid. Thus, legal challenges to undue restrictions on abortion procedures do not seek to vindicate some generalized notion of privacy; rather, they center on a woman's autonomy to determine her life's course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature. See, e.g., Siegel, Reasoning from the Body: A Historical Perspective on Abortion Regulation and Questions of Equal Protection, 44 Stan. L. Rev. 261 (1992); Law, Rethinking Sex and the Constitution, 132 U. Pa. L. Rev. 955, 1002-1028 (1984).

Presidential(s)elections do have consequences. Take a moment for silent outrage over Bush v. Gore. Better, send a check, or sign up to volunteer.