Word: webster
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...lower courts have struck down portions of the law. In November the Justice Department surprised many people by jumping into the Webster case to propose that the Supreme Court use the occasion to reverse Roe. While a reversal cannot be ruled out, few court watchers expect it just now. Supreme Court Justices usually prefer to muster a sizable majority behind highly controversial decisions, as they did in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the pivotal -- and unanimous -- 1954 school-desegregation case...
Another possible approach would be to disallow abortions beyond an earlier point in pregnancy, based on the assumption that medical advances permit the fetus to survive outside the womb at an earlier point. A provision of the Missouri law at issue in the Webster case requires doctors to perform tests to determine the viability of the fetus before an abortion can be performed after the 20th week of pregnancy...
...most abortions are already illegal, it is ; still nearly impossible to save those born before the 23rd week. Doctors question whether they will ever push viability back to a point much earlier than that. Until then, fetal lungs are not sufficiently developed. According to a brief filed in the Webster case by the American Medical Association, "the earliest point at which an infant can survive has changed little" since Roe was handed down...
...civil rights and the Viet Nam War in the 1960s, abortion could be the great preoccupation of the 1990s. "It will be a battle for years and years and years," says Samuel Lee, executive director of Missouri Citizens for Life, which helped write the law at issue in the Webster case. "I don't think it's ever going to go away...
...life marchers in Washington by telephone hookup, calling abortion "an American tragedy." Yet Republicans also know that their party's identification with the antiabortion cause could cost them votes. The Justice Department waited until two days after the presidential election to announce that it was entering the Webster case to seek a reversal...