Your Womb Is Belong to the Supreme Court

Today, Justice Kennedy disappointingly joined the new recidivist package the Supreme Court became under Republics to tell your doctor women are no longer free.

A law can be passed that prohibits a mis-named procedure that while rare is occasionally used to do the least harm to the woman. By naming the procedure 'partial birth abortion', anti-feminists imply the killing of a living being. The actual anme of the relevant procedure is Intact Dilation and Extraction, and it is far less dangerous and injurious to the woman who is forced to seek an abortion.

I am not about to go into all the reasons a woman may need to seek an abortion. The reasons for preventing her from receiving a safe one are prompted by disregard for her right to live her own life and to make her own decisions over her own body.

The 5-4 ruling said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.

The opponents of the act "have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.
(snip)
Abortion rights groups have said the procedure sometimes is the safest for a woman. They also said that such a ruling could threaten most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy, although government lawyers and others who favor the ban said there are alternate, more widely used procedures that remain legal.

The outcome is likely to spur efforts at the state level to place more restrictions on abortions.
(snip)
The Republican-controlled Congress responded in 2003 by passing a federal law that asserted the procedure is gruesome, inhumane and never medically necessary to preserve a woman's health. That statement was designed to overcome the health exception to restrictions that the court has demanded in abortion cases.

But federal judges in California, Nebraska and New York said the law was unconstitutional, and three appellate courts agreed. The Supreme Court accepted appeals from California and Nebraska, setting up Wednesday's ruling.

This is very unfortunate for the many women who have problems with their pregnancies requiring a procedure that does the least harm to them. That the Supreme Court does not regard women as humans with rights equal to theirs is a death knell to our freedoms and our rights.