Supreme Court Bends to 1992 Abortion Precedent in Denying Alabama Suit to Ban Dismemberment Abortions
by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) – The Supreme Court struck down an attempt by Alabama to reinstitute a 2016 law banning second-trimester abortions, citing the “undue burden” precedent from 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision.
A lower court had earlier denied the request by Alabama lawmakers based on the provision from the 1992 decision that laws carrying “a state regulation [which] has the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion” are to be considered an infringement of Roe V. Wade.
Justice Clarence Thomas concurred with the decision under the constraints of the law as they exist, but said that the legal maze woven into federal law over the last few decades since Roe has had the net effect of establishing dismemberment of a child while it is still alive as a constitutional right, which, quoting a court of appeals decision, he called “an aberration of constitutional law.”
“Dismembering a child alive is—in respondents’ words — ‘the most commonly used second-trimester abortion method,” Thomas wrote, and “account[s] for 99% of abortions in [Alabama] from [15 weeks] onward.” Thomas noted that “in this type of abortion the unborn child dies the way anyone else would if dismembered alive. It bleeds to death as it is torn limb from limb.”
“The notion that anything in the Constitution prevents states from passing laws prohibiting the dismembering of a living child is implausible,” he concluded of the “undue burden” tie-on being used by the highest court to deny the Alabama appeal.
Alabama was one of 12 states in May that proposed “heartbeat” legislation banning abortion after 6 weeks of pregnancy, which lawmakers are hoping eventually snowballs into an overturning of the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe V. Wade that established abortion as a constitutional right.