News: So You don't Sound like a Dumbass

by: Molly Lehman

As though we needed reminding about the political-party breakdown in the Supreme Court, the Court recently ruled 5-4 to uphold a ban on partial-birth abortions.

The decision, which was effectively split (surprise, surprise) between liberals and conservatives, will maintain the law Dubya signed into effect in 2003.

The ban has, essentially, politicians playing quack physician: rather than determining whether or not abortion should be performed, it regulates how it is done. This law is the first abortion-related piece of legislature to attempt to standardize the method of the procedure itself.

The ban, unsurprisingly, is on some seriously shaky medical ground. Partial-birth is much less common than other forms, making up only 10 percent of abortions performed. In the cases in which it is performed, however, it is usually a woman’s safest option. Currently no exception is in place within the law to allow it to be performed if a woman’s health is threatened.

So let’s back up and recap that: Essentially, the law does nothing but endanger women. Because there are other methods of completing the procedure, the ban will not actually prevent any abortions. However, it will deny some women access to the safest procedure available.

And why?

“Ethical and moral concerns,” say the judges voting to uphold it.

The conservatives were perturbed, they said, by graphic descriptions of the method. Of course, legislation really shouldn’t be passed according to what’s on a right-to-lifer’s bumper. Aside from that, of course, there are about seven other ways of performing abortions, and judges seem to have overlooked the fact that the exact same procedure is still legal if done in utero.

But then, medical “technicalities” aren’t really of interest here. This is much less about the actual law itself and much more about political preening. Abortion has been one of the hottest political debate topics since Clinton got a blow job, and it’s one of Bush’s specialties. It was Bush who signed the ban into law originally; it was also he who appointed two of the current conservative judges who voted to uphold it now.

Beyond all of this is a hard, abiding sexism on the Supreme Court. The majority opinion maintains that the ban was upheld in part because women receiving partial-birth abortions did not know what the procedure entailed. But rather than passing legislation requiring physicians to inform women of these procedures, they passed a ban on the entire business.

This decision, said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, writing the minority opinion, “cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this court—and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women’s lives.”

In an effort, ostensibly, to protect women, the Court has belittled them. Justice Kennedy claimed to only be protecting a woman from “grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she did not know,” but he seems uninterested in actually informing her.

Regardless of opinions on abortion itself, the upholding of the ban is only perpetuating weak laws and strengthening poor medical ethics. Let’s hope that the next time it comes around, the judges will do their homework.