November 29, 2005

Abortion case to be argued tomorrow.

Linda Greenhouse writes about Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England:
When the Supreme Court meets on Wednesday to hear its first abortion case in five years, the topic will be familiar: a requirement that doctors notify a pregnant teenager's parent before performing an abortion....

[O]f the 43 states with parental-involvement statutes, New Hampshire is one of only five that do not also provide an exception for non-life-threatening medical emergencies, and it was on this basis that two lower federal courts declared the law unconstitutional....

Waiting in the wings, as the justices surely know, is another, perhaps even more highly charged abortion case. The Bush administration recently filed an appeal in defense of the federal ban on the procedure that abortion opponents have labeled "partial birth abortion," and the court must decide shortly whether to hear it.

CORRECTION: "Today" in the title corrected to "tomorrow." It is not Wednesday!

3 comments:

SippicanCottage said...

In quarreling about the shadow we often lose the substance.

Troy said...

I'll be haapy so long as a child's right to have a major medical procedure without telling her parents is upheld. Parental notification! What are we brutes?

reader_iam said...

Until someone can explain to me why parents have to provide written permission for, say, their teenage-daughter to carry Midol in her purse, I'll never, ever understand the problem with parental notification in the case of abortion (and--do I have to say it?--OF COURSE, there are RARE exceptions--and those are addressed in every serious parental-notification bill).

I've always thought this one is a no-brainer--unless there is actually an additional, ulterior motive that no one wants to talk about.

So I won't.