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WASHINGTON The Supreme Court on Wednesday hears a pair of cases that could lead to some of the strictest limits on abortion since it was legalized.
The two lawsuits over the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 are also being watched closely for clues about the direction of the court since the addition of Chief Justice John Roberts in 2005 and Justice Samuel Alito this year.
The justice that Alito replaced, Sandra Day OÂ?Connor, voted with the 5-4 majority in a 2000 ruling that overturned NebraskaÂ?s ban on the procedure that opponents call Â?partial-birth abortion.Â?
The method involves bringing the fetus into the birth canal and then removing its brain to shrink the head and allow removal.
In striking down the Nebraska law, the court said it did not include an exception for the womanÂ?s health, and that its language covered more than one type of abortion.
The two cases to be heard Wednesday, Gonzales v. Carhart and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood, grow out of CongressÂ?s attempt to deal with those objections.
In its 2003 law, Congress stated that partial-birth abortion is never medically necessary to preserve a womanÂ?s health. It allows the procedure only when a womanÂ?s life is at stake.
The law also includes a detailed description of the procedure it intends to ban but in laymanÂ?s terms that do not incorporate medical terminology. That has led abortions rights advocates to claim that the law could be used to prohibit abortions as early as 12 to 15 weeks.
Almost as soon as President Bush signed the abortion law in November 2003, it was challenged in federal lawsuits filed in Nebraska, New York and California. All three U.S. district judges issued orders forbidding enforcement of the ban.
In 2004, all three courts declared the law unconstitutional. All three cited the lack of a specific health exception, and the California court also found that the lawÂ?s language was too vague.
The opinions were later upheld by three federal appeals courts.
The Supreme Court agreed this year to hear the Carhart case from Nebraska and the Planned Parenthood case from California. The New York case has been suspended pending the high courtÂ?s decision.
The Supreme Court will release audiotapes Wednesday soon after arguments in the two cases are completed. The court will issue one ruling in the two cases, said Roger Evans, an attorney for Planned Parenthood. That ruling is expected by summer.
Dr. Karen Lifford, medical director for Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, said use of the term partial-birth abortion in the lawÂ?s name is misleading.
Â?What generally would be suggested by that name is that the federal abortion ban only applies to procedures very late in pregnancy, that it involves killing a fully developed fetus,Â? she said. Â?In fact this isnÂ?t true, and itÂ?s deceptive language meant to deceive.Â?
Evans said the law prohibits steps that are regularly used in second-trimester abortions, and has nothing to do with viability.
Dr. Anthony Levatino, a Las Cruces, N.M., obstetrician-gynecologist, disputes that contention that the law could be used to ban the termination of early pregnancies.
Levatino, who once performed abortions up to 23 weeks of pregnancy but who now is an anti-abortion advocate, says the lawÂ?s language describes the procedure known as intact dilation and extraction, or D&X.
That procedure is used only from about 23 weeks of pregnancy onward, he said.
In any case, he said, partial-birth abortions are a bad choice for women.
The procedure typically takes three days to complete, which is too long for a woman with high-risk pregnancy complications, he said.
Â?The way you end a pregnancy to save a womanÂ?s life is to deliver the (baby),Â? Levatino said. Â?If you wait three days to do a partial birth abortion, sheÂ?s going to end up in the morgue.Â?
He called the health exception appeal a Â?legal tactic,Â? contending that the Supreme Court has previously ruled that it encompasses mental, social, and economic well-being.
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Donna McNichol, a regional director for Planned Parenthood in Solano County, Calif., said she does not know which procedure doctors used to perform her second trimester abortion, but she is grateful 20 years later for her health.
Â?I left it to my doctor, who I really trusted, and my (obstetrician-gynecologist) who referred me to this doctor, to do whatever medical procedure was necessary to perform it as safely as possible,Â? McNichol, 49, said in an interview.
McNichol said she started bleeding the night after her first prenatal visit, about eight weeks into her pregnancy, and it never stopped.
The doctors initially diagnosed her with a condition involving the improper placement of the placenta, which would complicate but not doom her pregnancy.
Â?I wasnÂ?t terminating the pregnancy, naturally, and I wasnÂ?t proceeding healthfully either,Â? she said.
As the weeks progressed, though, McNicholÂ?s iron count plummeted to the point of considering a blood transfusion a troubling prospect at a time of concern over AIDS contamination of blood supplies.
McNichol talked with her family and medical providers and decided to terminate the pregnancy at 20 weeks, about two-thirds into her second trimester. She later learned, she said, that she was suffering from a dangerous condition in which the placenta had separated from the uterus.
Â?Doctors need to be able to provide medical care, not politicians,Â? McNichol said.
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To some observers, the case is as interesting for the clues it might provide about the Roberts court as for its impact on abortion law.
In their confirmation hearings, both Roberts and Alito said they agreed that it was important to respect legal precedents set in cases the court decided previously.
But if a court majority upholds the 2003 law, legal experts told Congressional Quarterly magazine, that would reverse its 2000 decision in the Nebraska case.
Such a decision would Â?suggest that this court might be quite aggressive in rewriting Supreme Court case law,Â? Robert Schapiro, a law professor at Emory University in Atlanta, told CQ.
The court could uphold the new law without reversing its 2000 decision, experts told the magazine but that would mean accepting CongressÂ?s assertion that partial-birth abortions are never medically necessary.
That would demonstrate an unusual degree of deference by the court to the legislative branch, they said.
Â?It would seem to really open the door to Congress to overrule Supreme Court cases by calling it fact-finding,Â? Duke University law professor Erwin Chemerinsky told CQ.
On the Web:
Abortion rights advocatesÂ? view: www.voice4choice.org/inform/gvc.php
Abortion opponentsÂ? view: secondlookproject.org/emailpostcards/
Christine GrimaldiÂ?s e-mail address is cgrimaldicoxnews.com
c.2006 Cox News Service
