Partial Birth Abortion: A Test for the Roberts Court

(Hat tip: Steve Dillard at Southern Appeal)

Professor Rick Garnett (of Mirror of Justice) and Professor Mike Paulsen write in The Weekly Standard:

THE ROBERTS COURT has begun its 2006-07 session, and already on the docket are hot-ticket cases involving the use of race in school admissions, the use of child-victim statements in criminal-abuse cases, and the federal government's obligation to regulate greenhouse gases. But the case that may define this term is the Court's reconsideration of the grisly practice known as partial-birth abortion.

For as long as Americans have known about the several thousand partial-birth abortions performed each year, they have--by comfortable and consistent margins--agreed with the late senator Daniel Patrick Moy nihan that "[the procedure] is infanticide, and one would be too many." Nevertheless, the Supreme Court declared six years ago in Stenberg v. Carhart that Nebraska's effort to ban this particular late-term abortion method violated the right to abortion that was manufactured in the 1973 Roe v. Wade case.

Congress responded with a ban of its own, one that was designed to satisfy the standards set out in Carhart. But this effort, the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, has now been rejected by lower federal courts. The question before the Court now, in Gonzales v. Carhart and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood, is whether the justices will permit us to regulate this procedure, which revolts Red and Blue America alike.

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