Gonzales v Carhart

Gonzales v Carhartt

The so called partial birth abortion ban doesn’t intend to protect women or fetuses. It isn’t only an effort to end post-viability abortion, it isn’t an effort to “draw a bright line between abortion & infanticide,” as congressmen so smugly claim, nor is it based on medical/public health concerns. It doesn’t even make much sense.

The ban seriously jeopardizes women’s health. We can no longer take for granted the right to make reproductive decisions based on medical knowledge and individual needs. Period. Don’t just notice this in passing. Read Justice Ginsburg’s dissenting opinion (starts on pg 54). Read the majority opinion. Read the law it upholds.

I am angry. Yesterday, when the news broke, I was seeing too much red to see the keyboard. For now the most constructive thing I can say is read the dissenting opinion. Justice Ginsburg gets to the heart of the matter: the federal abortion ban “and the court’s defense of it, cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at” women’s right to an abortion, “a right declared again and again by this Court—and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women’s lives”