Sure, but that merely begs the question of what on earth is interstate commerce when it comes to abortion. You can put a boilerplate “interstate commerce” limitation on pretty much any federal legislation, but that doesn’t really tell you anything about how the statute might be limited by Article I issues. And barring meaningful and ascertainable limitations built into the statute (e.g., the revised Gun-Free Schools Act provision that limited it to guns that have actually traveled in interstate commerce), the practical effect is that the statute presumptively applies to every IDX performed anywhere in the country.
It would certainly be amusing to see some OB make the claim that he’s exempt from the statute because his IDX abortions are purely intrastate. If such a case were ever to arise, I’d wager pretty much any sum of money that Scalia and Thomas would suddenly embrace the New Deal case law. Fetuses trump everything with the wingnuts. (Take note, Rudy Guiliani.)
Anyway, to get back to the OP, my point about this being a result of Congressional action is that it pretty much establishes that the feds, not just the states, have authority to regulate the reproductive rights of individual citizens. Yikes.
I don’t think it begs the question in a logical sense. It certainly does raise the question of which doctors it actually applies to.
I’m not saying that adding the interstate commerce provision makes it bullet-proof. I’m just saying that it’s distinguishable from *Morrison *and Lopez because of that clause.
Oh, please. I’m as pro-choice as anyone here and think this law is stupid, but this is absurd.
Does anyone know what the law says about finding out a late-term fetus has a severe birth defect that won’t kill it but will basically render the child a vegetable for the rest of its life? Can the woman abort as long as it’s done the more dangerous way, or do viability laws prevent that?
Why ? Wherever these people get the chance, they demonstrate incredible malice towards women. Assuming that they mean laws like this to hurt women is like assuming that the Klan supports a law because it hurts blacks. It’s what they do.
And of course, Der Trihs’s statement explains why the head of NRLC is a woman, and why the vast majority of crisis pregnancy center staff members are women. Clearly, they must be misogynists who want to cause as much harm as possible to themselves and their fellow women.
It’s from a Time magazine article; an interview on the anti abortion Mexico City Policy which killed a lot of women. No cite online that I can find, but you aren’t seriously going to claim that it’s implausible that he did say it, are you ? The man talks like Emperor Palpatine.
It’s all about politics these days, winning the hearts and minds. The more unreasonable the anti-abortion-rights crowd can make the pro-abortion-rights crowd seem, the more people they win to their cause. If they can make the pro-abortion-rights crowd cry loudly in favor of a procedure that the majority of Americans recoil from to a greater degree than they do for ordinary abortions, score one for them.
It wasn’t so much about the babies (although no doubt true pro-lifers will be happy if any of the babies are saved by this procedure being banned), but about the fight, about making their opponents advocate a distasteful position. And if the pro-abortion-rights crowd actually continues the fight by actively pushing a law to permit “Partial-Birth abortions” (as opposed to said procedure falling under the general permission of abortions), even better.
Considering that the anti-abortion-rights crowd considers aborting the fetus at all to be murder, I imagine that they’d applaud anything that encourages the mother toward a live birth - if the slightly more dangerous (is it really?) alternative to PBA would have that effect.
It won’t have that effect and yes, it’s really more dangerous, not dramatically more dangerous but the chances of complications and injury are ncreased.
It may not, true, but from the anti-abortion-rights crowd perspective, increasing the safety to the pregnant woman of an abortion procedure, which they feel is murder, is hardly a priority when live birth remains an option.
You’re not looking at it from the right angle (no pun intended) - if the woman then *chooses * to proceed with a more dangerous method, it’s her fault. I guess. Or something.
Remember, we’re mostly talking about the same people who think that trying to vaccinate against HPV is a bad thing, and that when it comes to sex, people should be kept as ignorant as possible rather than well informed.
I favor access to safe, legal abortions for women, but I find that statement to be as obnoxious as anything coming out of the wing-nut fringes of the anti-abortion crowd. Is it that hard to understand that many, many people on the other side of the debate hold principle views even if a few are nut-cases? Try not to paint with such a broad brush if you actually want to debate the issue.