To the editor:
According to (CNS columnist Douglas W. Kmiec’s column) “Abortion ban a good Mother’s Day present”, in the May 2007 Catholic Courier, the Supreme Court’s April decision upholding the federal law that prohibits partial birth abortion “is important for the insight it supplies about the new court”. The column highlights the fact that the majority of justices acknowledged that a mother might regret choosing to abort, and speculated that her distress would be far greater if the abortion were performed by partial birth abortion.
However, the ruling states that because there are other later term abortion methods available to women, the law does not infringe upon a woman’s right to have an abortion, and thus is constitutional.
So the law will not prevent abortions; it will just guarantee they are performed in a less obviously barbarous manner than partial birth abortion. People will no longer be confronted with the graphic demonstration that abortion kills a child who would soon have been born that partial birth abortion presents.
Further, because the Supreme Court ruling specifically states that the government may not forbid abortion, and says that the law’s lack of a health exception allows it to be challenged in “as applied” suits, the ruling reaffirms the Court’s earlier rulings in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.
Both the federal law banning partial birth abortion, and the Supreme Court ruling declaring that law constitutional show that putting regulations on the practice of abortion will not end abortion. It allows people to be reassured that abortion is properly regulated, while diverting attention from the underlying reason that all abortion should be illegal.
Grace K. LaDouce
Park Avenue
Auburn
