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Catholic World News News Feature

US Supreme Court upholds partial-birth abortion ban April 18, 2007

The US Supreme Court has upheld a federal ban on partial-birth abortion.

By a 5-4 ruling, the court found that the law passed by Congress in 2003 does not violate the US Constitution. The court's ruling will allow the ban to go into effect for the first time.

The decision announced on April 18 was the first major test for the Supreme Court on the abortion issue since the appointments of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. Both new members of the court voted with the majority, along with Justices Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas.

Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy said that the Partial Birth Abortion Act satisfied the tests set by the Supreme Court in a 2000 decision, in which the court had found that a state ban on the partial-birth abortion procedure placed an undue burden on women because it did not allow for cases in which a pregnancy might imperil the mother's health. The legislation approved by Congress in 2003 was tailored to meet that objection by providing an exception in cases when the partial-birth abortion procedure could be required to protect the mother's health-- although doctors testified that such cases are exceedingly rare or even non-existent.

In a sharply worded minority opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg complained that the majority had ignored the earlier Supreme Court precedent. Today's result, she said, is "alarming." She was joined in her dissent by Justices Stevens, Souter, and Breyer.

The federal ban approved by Congress in 2003, after years of heated controversy, had never taken effect. Abortion advocates had succeeded in obtaining stays on the implementation of the law, with federal judges in Nebraska, California, and New York finding the legislation unconstitutional. The Supreme Court decision will reverse those rulings by lower federal courts.

Although the partial-birth technique is used in only a tiny fraction of the abortions performed in the US each year, the Supreme Court decision gave new energy to the American pro-life movement, observed Joseph Scheidler, the director of the Chicago-based Pro-Life Action League. The ruling, he noted, "signals a new sensitivity on the part of the Court to the plight of the unborn child in a late-term abortion."