Justice Kennedy and his other colleagues responsible for the atrocious decision 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. They ratified the politically based and dangerously dubious Congressional claim that criminalizing the intact dilation and extraction 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 other words, the Supreme Court has decided what's best for women medically as opposed to qualified doctor...how insane is that...Next time your daughters get sick, just take them into court for the male judges to make a diagnoses...yah right.
The truly sad part is that the Court is doing exactly what President Bush chose his nominees to do... sway the court of so-called “moral” issues that are critical energizing issues for the conservative base’s religious, evangelical, and socially fascist elements - those people who believe that the government has every right to tell American citizens not only what they can and cannot do with their bodies in a medical situation (a la Terri Schaivo), but those who believe that your body does and should belong to the State, that the government and the church should have every right to enforce and choose when, how, and with what method a woman or a family has a child but cares little about the future rearing of that child.
Justice Kennedy actually reasoned that banning the procedure was good for women in that it would protect them from a procedure they might not fully understand in advance and would probably come to regret. This way of thinking, he poses women as flighty creatures who must be protected by men, (which reflects the current legal system). It also gives weight to the notion that a woman’s place is where men decide.
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.
From Justice Kennedy's opinion in yesterday's Carhart decision
"The government may use its voice and its regulatory authority to show its profound respect for the life within the woman. See, e.g., 505 U. S., at 873. The Act’s ban on abortions involving partial delivery of a living fetus furthers the Government’s objectives. Congress determined that such abortions are similar to the killing of a newborn infant. This Court has confirmed the validity of drawing boundaries to prevent practices that extinguish life and are close to actions that are condemned."So, if Congress decides that one type of abortion is similar to killing a newborn infant, even though that method is in reality no more cruel or disturbing than other methods still available to her under the law (at least as the law currently stands), a woman's health may be put at risk. That is now the law of the land. Welcome to 1984.
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