Time to fight abortion decision by Phyllis Snyder
The Supreme Court has made it clear that ideology trumps women's health in the nation's highest court.
On April 18, the Supreme Court made it clear that respect for legal precedent is dead. Clear that Roe v. Wade's protections
are no longer immutable. Clear that it doesn't mind letting its own self-described "moral concerns" trump constitutional protections. Clear that the religious right has ascended to the federal bench. Clear that it favors politics over safety and science, leaving doctors with fewer options – and women at risk for their health and safety.
The Supreme Court delivered a devastating blow to women and women's health in its 5-4 decision to uphold the federal abortion ban in Gonzalez v. Carhart and Gonzalez v. Planned Parenthood. Since 1973, this is the first time an abortion ban that does not include an exception for a woman's health has been upheld. This marks a dangerous erosion of reproductive rights and health.
Reproductive-rights activists and defenders of religious liberty were outraged that Congress, the president and now the Supreme Court could all cast aside the rights of women. Contrary to Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion, the federal abortion ban does create an "undue burden" on women – preventing them from accessing what might be the safest way for them to terminate a pregnancy.
Our anger has strengthened our resolve. We had hoped not to have to fight for safe, legal abortion again, but we are ready, willing and able. We've done it before; we can do it again. We must.
Consider the forceful dissenting opinion, in which Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that this "alarming" decision "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." This, in her words, is "irrational."
We must consider again what it means when the self-described "moral concerns" of five male Supreme Court justices can cast aside all women's right to safety, respect for women as moral decision-makers and three decades of legal precedent.
Since 2000, when a very different Supreme Court overturned, also by a 5-4 vote, a nearly identical state abortion-ban law, the composition of the court has been radically transformed by President Bush's appointments of Samuel Alito Jr. and John Roberts. This is what we feared would happen, and it was one reason NCJW opposed the confirmation of these clearly anti-choice nominees.
As I read this disturbing decision, I bitterly recalled how both men assured the Senate Judiciary Committee that they would respect legal precedent.
But Ginsburg wrote, "Ultimately, the Court admits that 'moral concerns' are at work, concerns that could yield prohibitions on any abortion. ... By allowing such concerns to carry the day and case, overriding fundamental rights, the Court dishonors our precedent."
This new precedent likely will open the floodgates for a wave of anti-choice legislation. The religious right has clearly scored a victory and will use this decision to eviscerate other reproductive rights. We must be vigilant.
We cannot change the Supreme Court's decision, but we can reaffirm our commitment to federal court appointees loyal to the Constitution rather than to ideologically driven "moral concerns."
Surely it must be clear to all that the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court matters, and with 2008 elections quickly approaching, voters are unlikely to forget this tragic and very close decision. We must make sure that the "moral concerns" of five men do not determine the options of American women, who have their own moral and religious beliefs.
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) have announced their introduction of the Freedom of Choice Act. This legislation is designed to protect the health of women and has the added benefit of putting Congress on record in support of a woman's right to choose.
I hope all senators and representatives who care about America's women will immediately take a pledge to support the Freedom of Choice Act and the women of our nation.
(Phyllis Snyder is president of the National Council of Jewish Women).
Court decision prevents murder by Rabbi Avi Shafran
The U.S. Supreme Court's upholding of the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act has elicited the usual cries of protest from abortion rights advocates and, also as usual, they include an assortment of Jewish groups and The New York Times.
That latter institution characterized the term "partial-birth abortion" itself as a "provocative label" for the presumably more descriptive "intact dilation and extraction." As it happens, the Times and the other advocates are correct about the inaccuracy of the term "partial-birth abortion," but not because it exaggerates the repugnance of the procedure in question.
Despite concerted efforts by some to misrepresent the law, its language is stark and clear. It prohibits any overt act, like the puncturing of the brain, "that the person knows will kill" a fetus whose "entire… head is outside the body of the mother or, in the case of breech presentation, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother."
Thus, it is not abortion at all that the law at issue addresses but rather the killing of a baby whose head or most of whose body has emerged into the world. Readers of the Times' editorial page, and much of the "mainstream" media, might be forgiven for not realizing what the procedure actually entails.
Nor have the media done a very good job explaining what exemptions the law does or does not contain. Since it does not contain an exemption for the mother's "health," there is wide assumption -- at least from the evidence of calls and e-mails I have received -- that even if the mother's life were somehow threatened by allowing the partially emerged infant to fully emerge, the federal prohibition would stand.
In fact, though, the law contains an explicit exception for cases where the procedure is deemed necessary to preserve the mother's life.
As to a "health" exemption, the Supreme Court's majority found, among other things, that if there is any threat to maternal health -- a possibility about which no medical consensus exists -- "safe alternatives to the prohibited procedure… are available."
Even more troubling to me as a Jew than the misunderstandings of the facts is that a number of rabbis and Jewish organizational spokespeople have asserted that Jewish religious tradition is somehow offended by the recently upheld law. The president of Hadassah, to take one example, has baldly stated that the law "undermines Jewish values."
She and others who have made similar claims are misinformed and, in turn, misinform.
To be sure, the Talmudic sources are clear that the life of a Jewish woman whose pregnancy endangers her takes precedence over that of her unborn when there is no way to preserve both lives. That is why Agudath Israel, while we oppose Roe v. Wade's effective "abortion on demand," has not and would never favor a wholesale ban on abortion.
While the matter is not free from controversy, there are rabbinic opinions that allow abortion when the pregnancy seriously jeopardizes the mother's health. But those narrow exceptions do not translate into some unlimited "mother's right" to "make her own reproductive choices" -- the position Hadassah enthusiastically trumpets.
Moreover, in the specific context of "intact dilation and extraction" -- to use the Times' preferred nomenclature -- Jewish law certainly confers no right to kill a live baby whose head, or most of whose body, has already emerged. Indeed, once birth has already occurred, Jewish law makes clear, the newborn child has no less right to live than does the mother.
Stated simply, what the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act prohibits is, in the eyes of Jewish law, little if anything short of murder.
Nothing, of course, prevents a Jew, or Jewish organization or rabbi, from ignoring the teachings of the Jewish religious tradition. But intellectual integrity, if nothing else, should prevent anyone from misrepresenting the content of a law or what Jewish tradition has to say about killing an unborn child -- or a born one.
(Rabbi Avi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.)
