One of the two new drastic anti-abortion laws passed in April in Nebraska won't take effect. It would have required doctors to screen patients for potential mental-health or physical problems and would have allowed patients to sue later if they experienced post-abortion problems and believed the screenings had been insufficient. The state's attorney general, Jon Bruning, said yesterday he wasn't going to waste state resources defending a law unlikely to hold up in court, and he agreed to a permanent injunction against enforcing it.
The other law, still on the books, would ban all abortions after 20 weeks based on the scientifically unsupported idea that fetuses feel pain at that time. That law is scheduled to go into effect Oct. 15 but that could be challenged as well. But, according to the Associated Press story:
Lawyers on both side of the debate have said abortion rights groups may choose not to take on Nebraska's ban because of fears that losing could change the legal landscape for abortion nationwide. If opponents challenge the law and lose, the court could redefine the timeline for abortion restrictions, throwing out viability -- when a fetus could survive outside the womb -- in favor of the point when a fetus could feel pain, as it's defined by Nebraska's law.
This story shows both the failure and the genius of the right's efforts to pass blatantly unconstitutional laws to chip away at Roe v. Wade. On the one hand, many of them will fall to challenges early on, preventing the kind of precedent revisiting that anti-abortion groups hope for. On the other hand, more nuanced bills present a conundrum for abortion-rights groups who don't want to challenge them and lose. Either way, a little victory like this seems to do little to stem the tide of challenges to what should be settled law.
-- Monica Potts
