Yesterday’s stunningly patronizing and patriarchal Supreme Court decision “upholding the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act” demonstrates how much of a hard right turn the judicial branch has taken (and will continue to take for some time) and how moralistic and even misogynistic the five justices who voted in the majority truly are. The consequences will be felt for years. In addition, to subordinating a woman’s health and a doctor’s judgment to conservative ideology, the decision will likely deter many current and future physicians from pursuing obstetrics as a specialty, which will further compromise the health of expectant mothers. This continues to be a sad week for this nation.
From the New York Times:
Among the major flaws in yesterday’s Supreme Court decision giving the federal government power to limit a woman’s right to make decisions about her health was its fundamental dishonesty.
Under the modest-sounding guise of following existing precedent, the majority opinion — written by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito — gutted a host of thoughtful lower federal court rulings, not to mention past Supreme Court rulings.
It severely eroded the constitutional respect and protection accorded to women and the personal decisions they make about pregnancy and childbirth. The justices went so far as to eviscerate the crucial requirement, which dates to the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, that all abortion regulations must have an exception to protect a woman’s health.
As far as we know, Mr. Kennedy and his four colleagues responsible for this atrocious result are not doctors. Yet these five male justices felt free to override the weight of medical evidence presented during the several trials that preceded the Supreme Court showdown. Instead, they ratified the politically based and dangerously dubious Congressional claim that criminalizing the intact dilation and extraction method of abortion in the second trimester of pregnancy — the so-called partial-birth method — would never pose a significant health risk to a woman. In fact, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has found the procedure to be medically necessary in certain cases.
Justice Kennedy actually reasoned that banning the procedure was good for women in that it would protect them from a procedure they might not fully understand in advance and would probably come to regret. This way of thinking, that women are flighty creatures who must be protected by men, reflects notions of a woman’s place in the family and under the Constitution that have long been discredited, said a powerful dissenting opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter and Stephen Breyer. [full text]
Kmareka.com 
Included in the Supreme Court decision is the testimony before the Senate of a nurse who witnessed a partial-birth abortion:
Call it patronizing, patriarchal, moralistic, misogynistic. But we should put away the thesaurus and talk about what partial-birth abortion really is, despite how uncomfortable it may be. There’s a reason a very large majority, including many who generally consider themselves pro-choice, oppose this procedure. Because it is barbaric, and should have no place in a civilized society.
this law is going to cause risk and anguish to women who are facing terrible decisions when a pregnancy goes wrong. it will hurt their families, who depend on them, as well. if you don’t trust a woman to make a moral and medical decision in a crisis pregnancy, how could you ever trust her to raise a child?
when a pregnancy puts a woman’s life or health at risk, there is no easy way out. i don’t know how many dead women it will take to turn people’s attitudes around, or how many women paralyzed or brain damaged. women do still die in childbirth, even here in the usa.
what is especially immoral is that the same society that claims to revere life shortchanges its children and adults with disabilities. the neighborhoods you would be afraid to walk in are full of women, children, elderly and disabled. they’re already born, so who cares?
There are decisions that make sense and those that do not, and there is established biological science in this matter that is simply cannot be argued. To kill viable children (“almost born”)is a rather drastic step that transcends the rights of either parent, especially since the rights of the “almost born” were hitherto unproteced. If as a nation, we do not defend then most defenseless among us, we will eventually not defend the righs of any among us.