Bloomberg News
April 23, 2007

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aNOnQIEVeRSM&refer=us

U.S. Supreme Court Abortion Ruling Denounced in Medical Journal
By Michelle Fay Cortez

April 23 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold the Federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act was an intrusion by government into the practice of medicine, said doctors writing for the New England Journal of Medicine.

The decision may revive local and nationwide efforts to restrict access to abortion services, wrote R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Michael Greene, professor of reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, questioned if the law passed by Congress was just a 'carefully calculated first step.''

'Both health care providers and patients should be alarmed by the current degree of intrusion by our government into the practice of medicine and even more so by the apparent trajectory that it seems poised to follow in the near future,'' Greene wrote in an article that was released by the journal.

The law makes it a crime for doctors to perform 'partial birth'' abortions, allowing the first nationwide ban on the procedure. The justices voted 5-4 last week that the legislation is constitutional even though it doesn't make an exception for pregnancies that pose a risk to the mother's health.

The doctors' opinions, published online today, will also be released in the print edition dated May 24.

While doctors want oversight and discussion of health and social matters, the conversations should take place between people who are acting in the best interest of a specific patient, wrote Jeffrey M. Drazen, the editor-in-chief of the journal.

"Government regulation has no place in this process,'' Drazen wrote. "With this decision the Supreme Court has sanctioned the intrusion of legislation into the day-to-day practice of medicine.''

`Human Family'

A medical license doesn't put doctors above the law, Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, an anti-abortion group based in Washington, in a telephone interview today.

"Just because someone considers something to be the practice of medicine, that doesn't put it beyond the judgment of the broader society as a whole,'' Johnson said. "We think that these unborn children are members of the human family and it is not a proper part of the practice of medicine to dismember them or partially deliver them and puncture their skulls.''

About 2,200 partial birth abortions are performed each year, according to Charo. During the procedure, the cervix is dilated, the fetus is partially extracted, the skull is punctured and the brain tissue removed before the fetus is fully removed from the birth canal. It is typically done late in the second trimester or in some cases during the last three months.

Terms of Law

Under the law, doctors may be put in prison for two years and fined up to $250,000 for "deliberately and intentionally'' for partially delivering a living fetus and subsequently killing it, a process known as an intact dilation and extraction. They may also be liable for monetary damages for psychological injury to the woman's husband or parents.

Previous decisions allowed states to regulate abortion in the months before a fetus was viable and outlaw it completely after the fetus could live independently, as long as the mother's life and health were both considered. The new ruling concludes that excluding health considerations doesn't cause women an undue burden, the doctors said.

"And thus the balance of interests shifts, with women's health no longer paramount but rather societal mortality and the state's interest in life even before the point of viability outside the womb,'' Charo wrote.

To contact the reporter on this story: Michelle Fay Cortez in Minneapolis at mcortez@bloomberg.net