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Guns and abortion rights
Listening to politicians talk about abortion, watching state legislatures put up ever more daunting obstacles, reading the opinions of judges who give the states a free pass, it’s abundantly clear to me that some constitutional rights are more equal than others. Or to put it another way, there are constitutional rights and then there is abortion — a right, increasingly, in name only, treated as something separate and apart, vulnerable in its isolation from the mainstream of those rights the Constitution actually protects.
And then, forcefully to the contrary, came this week’s opinion by a federal district judge in Alabama, Myron H. Thompson, who declared unconstitutional the state’s Women’s Health and Safety Act, which required doctors who performed abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. The law would have shut down three of Alabama’s five remaining abortion clinics.
There is so much to say about this remarkable 172-page opinion that it’s hard to know where to begin. So I’ll start with where Judge Thompson ended his opinion in Planned Parenthood Southeast v. Strange and it’s a point that has gone unsaid in too many quarters for too many years: the right to an abortion is a constitutional right like any other.
Just suppose, Judge Thompson wrote, that the justices were to recognize an individual right to keep a gun at home for self-defense. (As of course the court did, six years ago in the Second Amendment case, District of Columbia v. Heller.) Then suppose that sellers of firearms and ammunition were regulated by the state to such an extent that there were only two vendors left. “The defenders of this law would be called upon to do a heck of a lot of explaining,” Judge Thompson said, adding, “and rightly so in the face of an effect so severe.”
And then, forcefully to the contrary, came this week’s opinion by a federal district judge in Alabama, Myron H. Thompson, who declared unconstitutional the state’s Women’s Health and Safety Act, which required doctors who performed abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. The law would have shut down three of Alabama’s five remaining abortion clinics.
There is so much to say about this remarkable 172-page opinion that it’s hard to know where to begin. So I’ll start with where Judge Thompson ended his opinion in Planned Parenthood Southeast v. Strange and it’s a point that has gone unsaid in too many quarters for too many years: the right to an abortion is a constitutional right like any other.
Just suppose, Judge Thompson wrote, that the justices were to recognize an individual right to keep a gun at home for self-defense. (As of course the court did, six years ago in the Second Amendment case, District of Columbia v. Heller.) Then suppose that sellers of firearms and ammunition were regulated by the state to such an extent that there were only two vendors left. “The defenders of this law would be called upon to do a heck of a lot of explaining,” Judge Thompson said, adding, “and rightly so in the face of an effect so severe.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/07/opinion/new-judicial-approaches-to-abortion-rights.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region®ion=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0
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