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As featured on p. 218 of "Bloggers on the Bus," under the name "a MyDD blogger."

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Banning the "Imaginary"

The Supreme Court reversed course today and upheld a Congressional law banning "partial birth" abortion, a made-up term that Congressional leaders tried to admit wasn't even an applicable or real procedure, but which will end up representing nothing more than the chipping away of abortion rights at the state level. Reasonable people have always diasgreed on this issue - so have a good deal of unreasonable people - but I don't think anybody can actually support this illogic:

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.


A large fraction? That's doesn't make any sense. If the law would be unconstitutional in any fraction of cases, even a small fraction, then it's an unconstitutional law. Bean at LGM concurs:

Just because in the majority of cases a law is not unconstitutional as applied means that it does violate the rights of some. Backwards logic if I ever saw it -- a failed attempt to justify an obviously political decision that is bound to do damage to the Constitution.


This definitely heralds that, on reproductive rights at least, this Court as currently constructed will continue to chip away at Roe, although it's not entirely clear that this signals an overturning of it. It'll just make it harder for a woman to make that very difficult choice. Five men have cemented that today.

UPDATE: The only woman on the Court's dissent:

Ginsburg, in a lengthy statement, said “the Court’s opinion tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. For the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception protecting a woman’s health.”

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