This post contains about 20 links to feminist analysis of the Supreme Court’s opinion approving a ban on so-called “Partial Birth” abortions.<\/p>\n
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Feminist Law Professors:<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n The majority\u2019s opinion is striking for the almost absolute lack of focus on women. The medical procedure itself is discussed extensively. The role of the physician and medical judgment is discussed extensively. The impact on women and the idea that the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy has something to do with women, however, their right to body integrity, autonomy, liberty, is completely missing from the opinion. Only a reference to \u201can ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child\u201d and the conclusion that \u201csome women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained\u201d suggests this majority\u2019s view of women in the context of the issue \u2013 we are by-standers to the issue and by-standers to the right ultimately recognized in Roe and Casey, rather than those most affected.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Balkinization: Three Comments<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n The first is that the Court emphasizes Casey’s holding that states have legitimate interests in protecting potential life throughout the pregnancy. The Court uses this interest to justify the ban on intact D&E. But there is a strange lack of fit between the interest asserted and the means used to further it. Banning intact D&E does not save a single fetus’ life. […]<\/p>\n …The argument about mother love seems to be a makeweight; it seems to involve the claim that Congress knows better than women do about what they would choose in certain situations. The law forecloses choice rather than informing it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Lawyers, Guns and Money: Four Things To Remember When Reading Gonzales v. Carhart<\/i><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Making it much harder to successfully strike an abortion statute on facial grounds, as the Court has just done, may seem like a mere technicality but is a big deal. I explain why here<\/a>. Not only will this change in the standard applied by Casey<\/span> make litigation to protect a woman’s reproductive freedom much more expensive and difficult, but it will have the perverse effect of making the fact that abortion regulations almost invariably have much more impact on poor, rural women an argument in their favor<\/span>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Balkinization: The Profound Effects Of Justice O’Connor’s Retirement<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n The Next Hurrah: Infantilizing Women To Make A Point<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Roe<\/em> survived, but only because the majority did not explicitly overrule it. What they did overrule, by implication only, of course, was O’Connor’s somewhat sophistic “undue burden” test, under which a law survived unless it created an “undue burden” on women. Death is evidently not an undue burden when there is a point to make about abortion. Because Roe<\/em> survives, there will be new laws passed and new cases filed to test just how far states hostile to abortion can burden a woman’s right to choose whether to finish or end a pregnancy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Obsidian Wings: This case was not decided today. It was decided on November 2, 2004.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Gloria Feldt: Partial Truth Decision<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Indeed, the travesty of language around abortion is so pervasive that even Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the decision for the Court’s majority, in addition to using the term “partial birth abortion”, also used the term “abortion doctor” repeatedly in the ruling. Why did he not simply refer to doctors as “doctors”, or if ob\/gyns call them “ob\/gyns”? If another surgical procedure were under scrutiny, would he have he referred to “tonsillectomy doctor” or “hysterectomy doctor”? Of course not. But those who want to take away a woman’s human right to make her own childbearing decisions entirely have for so long used the term “abortion doctor” as an epithet that they have succeeded in getting even the highest court in the land to use their language.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n BitchPhD: Supremes Declare Women Less Intelligent Than Legislators<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n What the court’s decided, in essence, is that a woman’s right to make her own medical decisions is less important than preventing legislators from getting an ooky feeling by thinking about fetal heads being punctured. Our safety is less important than their feelings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n ACSBlog: Statement From The Center For Reproductive Rights<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n \u201cIt took just a year for this new Court to overturn three decades of established law. Today\u2019s ruling is a stunning assault on women\u2019s health and the expertise of doctors who care for them,\u201d said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights. \u201cThe Court has dramatically reduced the ability of doctors to provide services that, in their opinion, are the safest \/ best options to protect women\u2019s health. This Court believes that Members of Congress \u2013 not doctors \u2013 are in the best position to make medical decisions for their patients. In direct contradiction to earlier rulings and established law, today the Court announced that there are some aspects of women\u2019s health it is willing to sacrifice. This is a terrifying development, one with implications far beyond the abortion debate. Every American who cares about women\u2019s health, and doctors\u2019 ability to treat their patients appropriately, should be alarmed by this ruling.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Edited to add:<\/em><\/p>\n Pacific Views: The Supreme Court’s decision today is the equivalent of signing death warrants for hundreds of anonymous women<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Because there was no health exception included in this ban, and because it banned a medical procedure instead of a setting a time frame exclusion, upholding this ban is likely to be a death sentence for some of the women who need that procedure. A procedure that’s only allowed for medical reasons<\/a> and is only performed about 2,200 times a year<\/a>. But, but, you say, there’s a life exception, right?<\/p>\n I wonder what level of certainty it is that will define a life exception? Do you think women and their doctors will get to pick that? If I have only, say, a 10% risk of dying in childbirth and an 80% risk of merely getting maimed in the process, am I going to have to go ahead and face it? Would some chickenshit HMO bureaucrat parse my doctor’s recommendations and match them up with some risk assessment chart balancing their interest in keeping me healthy and alive with their interest in not getting the DoJ on their asses for performing a legally suspect medical procedure? If I were facing the sort of birth that causes doctors to recommend an intact D&X and they determine that I’m only likely to get seriously injured, and I end up dying anyway, well, damn, too bad. Who could have guessed?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The American Prospect: Miscarriage of Justice<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Perhaps in the only good news that can be culled from the opinion, it constitutes the death knell of one of the anti-choice movement’s favorite political ruses. For years the anti-abortion movement has argued that Roe v. Wade<\/em> was wrongly decided, in part, because it federalized abortion and took power away from individual states to decide how to address the abortion issue. In this way, anti-choice activists implicitly reassured the public that even if Roe<\/em> were overturned, abortion would undoubtedly remain legal at least in states like California, New York, and Washington.<\/p>\n But in the wake of yesterday’s ruling in Gonzales v. Carhart<\/em>, there is now little to stand in the way of a federal law banning abortions everywhere if Roe<\/em> is overturned. In other words, abortion is not really a question of states’ rights, but rather of controlling all pregnant women regardless of the state in which they live.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Faux Real: The One Thing I Find Hopelessly Cruel<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n The one thing I find hopelessly cruel \u2014 other than the obvious things that everyone else has noted \u2014 is that the type of abortion banned<\/a> was the one that allowed a family to say goodbye to and bury a very wanted child, often named, who was assigned a birth certificate. It was one way of allowing women<\/a> to view and hold their dead babies after delivery, one avenue of emotional healing after having gone through the majority of a pregnancy and then given the dire news that the pregnancy wasn\u2019t viable<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And I Wasted All That Birth Control: Health vs Life<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Where do you draw the line? Was my life actually at risk at the moment they chose to terminate the pregnancy? Well, my blood pressure was going higher and higher and they weren’t able to get it under control with the medications they had available. My kidneys has begun to shut down and I’d stopped producing urine. But I was alive<\/em>. I could have remained alive, possibly, under those circumstances for a while. Maybe they could have pushed it until I actually began to have seizures. Or maybe until I had a stroke. Or, maybe, since even after a stroke and having seizures I would have still been alive<\/em>, maybe they would have to wait until after I felt into a coma. But wait! If I’m in a coma, I’m still alive, right? Even if my brain has been irreparably damaged, I’m still ALIVE. Right?<\/p>\n So, my point is, sure– the “Partial Birth Abortion Ban” has a provision for the LIFE of the mother. But there is NO PROVISION FOR HER HEALTH. Or the health of her uterus, or her future children.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Pandagon: Do Women Have Lives?<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n It\u2019s a strike at the concept that women have independent value. If you reduce a woman to a baby factory, then one who needs a late term abortion is malfunctioning in her purpose somehow, so if she dies, she\u2019s scrap metal, I suppose. Or scrap blood and tissue, as it were. I hate to be blunt like this, but there it is. They skipped over the preliminaries about what kind of rights women should have and attacked the idea that our very existence and health matters if we\u2019ve failed in our duties as fetal incubators.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Digby: Winning With Icky<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Read this account<\/a> of another real life couple who had to make difficult decisions of life and death and late term abortion and then tell me that that woman just “didn’t feel like being pregnant any longer.” And ask yourself if you or anyone else has the right to tell those people what was the morally proper thing to do. I suppose if you believed that Bill Frist could diagnose Terry Schiavo from the floor of the senate, then you’ll probably agree that the guy from WizBang, Samuel Alito and the Republican congress are the best people to make these decisions. I tend to think that life is just a little bit more complicated than that, but then I don’t have the kind of Moral Clarity that allows me to believe that millions of children dying once they are born isn’t my problem, but keeping fetuses in the womb to full term no matter what the circumstances is a moral imperative.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Mad Melancholic Feminista: On The Small Fraction Of Relevant Cases<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that it is true that most women will not die or suffer significant health consequences if they are denied a late-term abortion. What bugs me is that his own reasoning assumes that there is a small (tiny?) fraction of women who will die or be harmed. I cannot believe it is acceptable to these men (Ginsburg dissented) that any woman would die based on their decision today.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Dahlia Withlick: Father Knows Best<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n What hasn’t changed is that Anthony Kennedy finds partial-birth abortion really disgusting. We saw that in his dissent in Stenberg<\/em>. That’s what animates and drives his decision. His opinion blossoms from the premise that if all women were as sensitive as he is about the fundamental awfulness of this procedure, they’d all refuse to undergo it. Since they aren’t, he’ll decide for them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Feministing: Highlights From Justice Ginsburg’s Dissent<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Echidne: Partial Death of Choice<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n What is unusual about this decision is that it allows for no exceptions for the woman\u2019s health. It doesn\u2019t matter what the health consequences for her are, as long as she won\u2019t die on the operating table, even if the fetus is already brain dead and even if not having access to this technique means that she will have her uterus perforated or her cancer spread more quickly, say. The physicians who use this technique after the ban can face a two-year prison sentence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n