Word: webster
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...movement may be getting a jolt from a hostile Supreme Court, whose ruling in the case of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services permits the states to place new restrictions on abortion. "Before Webster," says Susan Carroll, a political scientist with Rutgers University's Center for the American Woman in Politics, "there was a very real assumption, especially among college students, that the battle was over." That assumption is no longer valid...
Even the Justices found it impossible to discuss abortion with their usual comity. Justice Harry A. Blackmun, author of the Roe opinion, attacked the majority in Webster for cowardice, deception, disingenuousness and brute force. The ruling, he bristled, invites the states to pass restrictive laws % and "is filled with winks, and nods, and knowing glances to those who would do away with Roe explicitly." No less angry, Justice Scalia wrote that Justice O'Connor's reasons for refusing to reconsider Roe "cannot be taken seriously...
Rhetoric aside, the decision in Webster revealed that there are now four Justices who want to keep the right to abortion intact, four who would like to overturn Roe and give the states wider discretion to restrict abortion, and one -- Justice O'Connor -- who cannot be placed with certainty in either camp. In past abortion cases, O'Connor has said she would allow state restrictions as long as they are not "unduly burdensome." But, abortion-rights advocates say, she has yet to meet a burden she considers to be undue. Among those that have passed O'Connor's standard: requiring...
...they would never vote for an office-seeker who advocates restricting a woman's right to obtain an abortion. The poll also found that 57% do not believe that the court should overturn its ruling in Roe, while 61% disagree with the decision in the Webster case. Only 31% favor new state laws restricting access to abortion, while 57% oppose such limitations...
...politicians have the Supreme Court to thank for the fact that the abortion issue is now a nightmarish gauntlet that has to be run between two ravening mobs. Not because of last week's Webster decision, which opened the door (at least partway) to legislation restricting a woman's right to abortion, but because of the famous Roe v. Wade decision of 16 years ago, creating that virtually absolute, constitutional abortion right, which Webster partially overturned...