Wall Street Opinion Journal April 19, 2007
Yesterday’s abortion ruling was only a baby step.
To hear the extremes of the abortion debate tell it, yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling in Gonzales v. Carhart is the beginning of the end of abortion rights in America. The Christian Coalition declared that “it is just a matter of time” before Roe v. Wade “will also be struck down by the court,” while Senator Hillary Clinton called it “a dramatic departure from four decades of Supreme Court rulings that upheld a woman’s right to choose.”
They’re both wrong, but the dueling end-of-days rhetoric shows again how much the Supremes have polarized our abortion debate. In fact, yesterday’s 5-4 ruling is narrowly drawn and upholds a federal law that outlaws only a single, late-term procedure that Daniel Patrick Moynihan once described as “infanticide.”
Not only did the Court not overrule its Roe and Casey decisions, it didn’t even overrule Stenberg v. Carhart, the 2000 decision that overturned a Nebraska law banning partial-birth abortion. Instead, Justice Anthony Kennedy upheld the 2003 Congressional ban because he said it was more narrowly drawn. “The Act makes the distinction the Nebraska statute failed to draw,” he wrote, “by differentiating between the overall partial-birth abortion and the distinct overt act that kills the fetus.”
To be more precise, “The fatal overt act must occur after delivery to an anatomical landmark”–i.e., a fetal body part–and it must not be part of the actual delivery of a baby. We recommend Justice Kennedy’s opinion to readers who want to learn the grisly details of what partial-birth abortion actually involves. But the main distinction Mr. Kennedy draws is between an abortion procedure that takes place entirely in the womb and one that first withdraws the fetus part-way before killing it.
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