Word: bans
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...1990s and attached its own label - "partial birth abortion" - it became the rallying cry with which opponents began reversing many of the gains that the pro-choice movement had made over the previous two decades. This week, the Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on the procedure, which is a move that many believe will open the way for more abortion restrictions on the state level, where most of the debate over the issue is being waged these days...
...recent years. The powerful lobby group has found fertile ground in state capitols where rural and conservative legislators often come from both parties. University of Utah officials just lost their battle with the state's legislature over the geographic scope of its concealed carry law - they had sought to ban weapons on campuses, but the state supreme court said they had to comply with the state law, effectively blocking them from banning permitted guns. By contrast, in Kansas, Gov. Kathleen Sibelius just this week vetoed a law that sought to override local authorities who could put restrictions on carrying concealed...
...Make no mistake, abortion opponents won big in this case, Gonzales v. Carhart. It's the first time that the court has blessed a federal ban on an abortion method, and a serious blow to the longstanding rule that abortion restrictions must permit the procedure when necessary to preserve a woman's health. The slim majority here - five conservative justices led by Anthony Kennedy - skirted that rule by saying medical experts can't agree whether a woman would ever need this method to stay healthy (the law does contain an exception if the woman's life is at stake...
...more practical help to pro-choice advocates may be the majority opinion's suggestion that there's another way to challenge the ban: in a case where a specific woman would probably get sick if she didn't undergo an intact D&E. In this so-called "as applied" challenge, the court could see when the procedure was necessary to protect a woman's health and rule the law unconstitutional in those situations. (As the dissent points out, there may be logistical problems with how this would work in practice). It wouldn't be a total victory for abortion rights...
...happens to emerge from Thomas' concurring opinion, which also mentions the issue of "whether the Act constitutes a permissible exercise of Congress' power under the Commerce Clause." In other words, even as he supports the intact D& E law, Thomas wonders whether Congress actually can pass such a national ban on an abortion procedure, or whether that's a power reserved exclusively to the states. The issue wasn't raised in this case, but the implication is that the court might strike down the intact law as beyond Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce...