It was a totally partisan vote, of course. Bush’s two bitches voted against women.
Lest anyone think this will prevent 2nd or 3rd trimester abortions, it won’t. It only prevents doctors from being able to use one particular method – the SAFEST method. All this law does is force doctors to use methods which are more dangerous to the woman. The fetus will still be just as dead. The only point of this law is to hurt women and increase the odds that they will be harmed if they terminate pregnancies. Despicable.
Restricting what methods of X are allowed does not seem to be a violation of your right to get X, as long as you can still get X when you need it.
I don’t think the SCOTUS should be worrying about the intent of legislation, only the factual implications of it and whether or not those implications violate constitutional right. We (through the gov’t) can ban anything we want just because it’s “oogy” as long as the ban doesn’t infringe on someone’s rights.
I also take issue with the reporter’s statement that “the court banned a specific procedure”. The court did no such thing. Congress and the President banned the procedure, the court merely did not have justification to overrule the other two branches of government.
That’s an incorrect reading of the Constitution and Roe v. Wade. If banning a procedure increases the risk of abortions, and yet does not reduce the number of abortions performed, it can still be seen as a violation.
(I should say I am specifically restricting this to your apparent view of the fact that Roe/COTUS only protect the right to an abortion, not the right to a safe abortion, not wanting to get into the whole interpretation debate here.)
That isn’t necessarily true. Under the test in Casey, the standard is undue burden. If the remaining available abortion procedures are more dangerous, the higher level of deterrence could arguably be an undue burden. I haven’t read the decision today yet, but I’ll bet they are forced to jettison the undue burden standard and come up with something new to justify it.
It violates the right to privacy and doctor patient confidentiality.
More egregiously, it allows Congress to dictate how doctors are supposed to perform medical procedures. Why the hell do you want Tom delay telling doctors how to perform surgery?
Just when I thought my opinion of your intelligence could go no lower, you found rock bottom.
So you are so vehemently against abortion, that forcing a woman who may have a life-threatening condition to undergo a more risky procedure to save her life is a moral victory? What kind of morals do you have? You’re sick.
You’re on a hair-trigger, Dio. He specifically said it was “symbolic”. So his answer is it achieves nothing and it’s okay for women to be hurt or die for his symbolic, impractical “victory”.
Not so. Suppose we said you (and I and everyone else) can get a root canal whenever you need it, but you must opt for the less-safe and more painful “rusty corkscrew” method. I would feel as if my rights were being violated. You?
FriarTed, a serious question. Would you consider it a symbolic victory if a law were passed that made it legal to chop off a woman’s hand because she had an abortion? If not, where do you draw the line at hurting people for symbolic victories? What part of your theology says it’s okay to kill or maim someone for a purely symbolic victory?
So let me get this straight - Roe allows restrictions, yet supposedly, according to you, Congress and Tom Delay aren’t allowed to dictate how doctors perform medical procedures.
Meanwhile, the FDA had explicit approval rights over the drugs you and I can take - rights that were enabled in legislation approved in Congress by a number of bills going back to about 1902.
Nope, sorry. You don’t have a leg to stand on here. Clearly there is a public policy role in these cases, and Congress ought to act. Now, you can disagree with the decisions Congress makes here, and always the rights of patients ought to be respected, but to say there is no constitutional role for legislation in this area is clearly wrong.
Except that Roe says, IIRC, that in the third trimester you can balance the interests of the fetus and those of the mother. It does not say you can balance the interests of the mother against the interests of society. I am not sure how this can be spun as even considering the interests of the fetus. Roe’s balancing isn’t about “public policy.”
I think - I’d have to go back and read the decision again to be sure.