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"PARTIAL-BIRTH" ABORTION. Ugh, Dana, that's some nasty news. The Court's decision to uphold the "Partial-Birth" Abortion ban without forcing it to offer exceptions for maternal health is dangerous, both medically and legally. Legally because it opens the door to all sorts of small-bore regulations and restrictions that will, over time, convert abortions into a privilege mainly offered to the white and well-off. As Hadley Arkes predicted over at First Things, this decision will mean the effective, if not actual, end of Roe.
[I]f Roberts and Alito help simply to overturn that prior decision on partial-birth abortion, my own judgment the regime of Roe will have come to its end, even if Roe itself is not explicitly overruled. What the Court would be saying in effect is, �We are now in business to consider seriously, and to sustain, many plausible measures that impose real restrictions on abortion.�That would invite a flood of measures enacted by the states. They might be restrictions on abortion after the point of viability, for instance, or even earlier, with the first evidence of a beating heart. Or requirements that abortionists use a method more likely to yield the child alive. Or provisions that ban abortions on a child likely to be afflicted with disabilities, such as Down syndrome.Each restriction would command the support of about 70 or 80 percent of the country, including many people who describe themselves as pro-choice. And step by step, the public would get used to these cardinal notions: that the freedom to order abortions, like any other kind of freedom, may be subject to plausible restrictions; that it is legitimate for legislatures to enact those restrictions; and that it is, in fact, possible for ordinary folk, with ordinary language, to deliberate about the grounds on which abortions could be said to be justified or unjustified.That sounds right to me, and scary for all the obvious reasons. I also want to point to this affecting story of one family's late-term abortion. I could seek out a tear-jerker where the women would have died had the procedure not been conducted, but I think it's important to step back and defend the principle that, sometimes, parents may choose to terminate because the child's life would be so awful, brutish, sickly, and short. It's important, too, to think about the procedure, which is ghastly and painful and invasive -- nothing that would be chosen by someone who believed they had any other option. The Court has taken away not only a medical procedure, but a medical choice, and the fear is not merely that women will die, but that many more lives will be ruined.--Ezra Klein
