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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (78390)	10/27/2003 1:19:26 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

There's an odd bit in here about the health exemption. I thought that there just wasn't one. Didn't realize how that came to be. Ban is right's first step in dismantling Roe By Tom Teepen It may or may not withstand legal appeal, but either way the enactment by Congress of a ban on so-called partial-birth abortions was a step in a political process that is meant to end with outlawing all abortions within a few years. Where President Bill Clinton twice vetoed similar legislation, President Bush of course will happily sign this latest act. The legislation almost duplicates a Nebraska statute that the U.S. Supreme Court, voting 5-4, found unconstitutional three years ago. The question now is whether congressional tinkering perfected the language enough to turn one justice. The federal legislation describes the outlawed procedure more specifically than the Nebraska law did, perhaps answering one Supreme Court criticism. And where the court held that the Nebraska law erred by failing to allow an exemption to protect a pregnant woman's health, Congress answered with a finding of "fact" that such a procedure is never necessary for health reasons. Will the justices accept that sort of brush-off? Supporters of the ban are hoping that the case won't reach the Supreme Court until after 2004 - and that Bush has been re-elected - and has had a chance to appoint at least one additional anti-abortion justice. That, of course, is the larger game. The partial-birth ban is just a foot in the door. Indeed, the term itself is unknown to medicine. Anti-abortion activists made it up to put a repellent spin on a process that typically is resorted to in pregnancies that become gravely troubled in the second or third trimester, often involving gross fetal deformities. The process that reconciled the different House and Senate bills provided clear evidence that this Congress and this administration do not mean to settle for eliminating just one abortion procedure. The Senate had included a statement of support for the basic principles of Roe v. Wade, but the House wouldn't hear of it, so the Senate rolled over when the declaration was stripped from the final legislation. Congress already restricts abortions, denying coverage for low-income Medicaid patients. If it also can begin chipping away at the edges of the practice - criminalizing first one method, then demonizing and outlawing another - anti-abortion politics can eventually hammer to the core issue. The shortcut would be the appointment of Supreme Court justices eager to join the large minority that already is prepared to say the matter was wrongly decided in 1973 when the court deduced a constitutional privacy right that allowed for abortion as a patient-doctor decision. Bush has made it plain that that is his intention. His appellate appointees are strongly anti-abortion, and he has said any nominees for the Supreme Court would be in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, whose hard-right jurisprudence emphatically rejects Roe. Tuesday's action in Congress is widely portrayed as the end of a six-year campaign to end one type of abortion. It would be more accurately seen as another step in a relentless campaign to return women to the days when abortion was legally and medically hazardous. * Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers, 72 Marietta St. NW, Atlanta, GA 30302; e-mail: teepencolumn@coxnews.com.