Gonzales v. Carhart | |
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Argued November 8, 2006 Decided April 18, 2007 | |
Full case name | Alberto R. Gonzales, Attorney General, Petitioner v. LeRoy Carhart, et al.; Alberto R. Gonzales, Attorney General, Petitioner v. Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc., et al. |
Docket nos. | 05-380 05-1382 |
Citations | 550 U.S. 124 ( more ) 127 S. Ct. 1610; 167 L. Ed. 2d 480; 2007 U.S. LEXIS 4338; 75 U.S.L.W. 4210 |
Argument | Oral argument |
Decision | Opinion |
Questions presented | |
Whether, notwithstanding Congress's determination that a health exception was unnecessary to preserve the health of the mother, the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 is invalid because it lacks a health exception or is otherwise unconstitutional on its face. | |
Holding | |
The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 is constitutional. Respondents have not demonstrated that the Act, as a facial matter, is void for vagueness, or that it imposes an undue burden on a woman's right to abortion based on its overbreadth or lack of a health exception. United States Courts of Appeals for the Eighth and Ninth Circuits reversed. | |
Court membership | |
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Case opinions | |
Majority | Kennedy, joined by Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito |
Concurrence | Thomas, joined by Scalia |
Dissent | Ginsburg, joined by Stevens, Souter, Breyer |
Laws applied | |
U.S. Const. amend. V; Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act |
Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U.S. 124 (2007), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. [1] The case reached the high court after U.S. Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, appealed a ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in favor of LeRoy Carhart that struck down the Act. Also before the Supreme Court was the consolidated appeal of Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, whose ruling had the same effect as that of the Eighth Circuit.
The Supreme Court's decision upheld Congress's ban and held that it did not impose an undue burden on the due process right of women to obtain an abortion, "under precedents we here assume to be controlling", [2] such as the Court's prior decisions in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In a legal sense, the case distinguished but did not overrule Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), in which the Court dealt with related issues. Gonzales was widely interpreted as signaling a shift in Supreme Court jurisprudence toward a restriction of abortion rights, occasioned in part by the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor and her replacement by Samuel Alito. [3] [4] [5]
The Court found that there is "uncertainty [in the medical community] over whether the barred procedure is ever necessary to preserve a woman's health", and in the past the Court "has given state and federal legislatures wide discretion to pass legislation in areas where there is medical and scientific uncertainty." [2]
The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act was signed into law by President George W. Bush on November 5, 2003. It was found unconstitutional in the U.S. District Courts for the Northern District of California, the Southern District of New York, and the District of Nebraska. [6] [7] [8]
The federal government appealed the district court rulings, first bringing Carhart v. Gonzales before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. The panel unanimously affirmed the ruling of the Nebraska court on July 8, 2005. Finding that the government offered no "new evidence which would serve to distinguish this record from the record reviewed by the Supreme Court in Stenberg," they held that the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act was unconstitutional because it lacked an exception for the health of the woman. [9]
Attorney General Gonzales petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Eighth Circuit decision on September 25, 2005. Meanwhile, the Ninth Circuit also found the law unconstitutional, [10] as did the Second Circuit (with a dissent), [11] issuing their opinions on January 31, 2006. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the Carhart case on February 21, 2006, [12] and agreed to hear the companion Planned Parenthood case on June 19, 2006. [13]
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the Court that the respondents had failed to prove that Congress lacked authority to ban this abortion procedure. Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Clarence Thomas, and Justice Antonin Scalia agreed with the Court's judgment, joining Kennedy's opinion.
The Court left the door open for as-applied challenges, citing its recent precedent in Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of New England . According to Washington Post reporter Benjamin Wittes, "The Court majority, following the path it sketched out last year in the New Hampshire case, decided to let the law stand as a facial matter and let the parties fight later about what, if any, applications need to be blocked." [14]
The Court decided to "assume ... for the purposes of this opinion" the principles of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey .
The Court said that the lower courts had repudiated a central premise of Casey—that the state has an interest in preserving fetal life—and the Court held that the ban fit that interest so as not to create an undue burden. The opinion did not rely deferentially on Congress's findings that this intact dilation and extraction procedure is never needed to protect the health of a pregnant woman; in fact the Court found that "evidence presented in the District Courts contradicts that conclusion." However, Kennedy wrote that a health exception was unnecessary where medical testimony disputes Congress's findings, that Congress is still entitled to regulate in an area where the medical community has not reached a consensus. [2]
In addition, the Court distinguished this case from the Stenberg case (in which the Court struck down Nebraska's partial-birth abortion law) by holding that the state statute at issue in Stenberg was more ambiguous than the later federal statute at issue in Carhart. [2]
The majority opinion's statement that it "seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained" supported its conclusion that "the State has an interest in ensuring so grave a choice is well informed" because doctors might not tell patients graphic details about what goes on during the abortion. This also acknowledges a state interest for informed consent laws dealing with abortion. [15]
Without discussing the constitutional rationale of the Court's prior abortion cases (i.e. "due process"), the majority opinion stated it disagreed with the Eighth Circuit's determination that the federal statute conflicted with "the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, [which] is textually identical to the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment." [9]
Justice Thomas filed a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Scalia, which mentions saving for another day the issue of whether Congress had sufficient power under the Commerce Clause to enact this ban. [2] The Commerce Clause (the only Constitutional clause mentioned explicitly in any of the decision's three opinions) was also mentioned in the majority opinion.
The concurrence also stated that Justices Thomas and Scalia joined the Court's opinion "because it accurately applies current jurisprudence." In addition, the concurrence reiterated the justices' view that current abortion jurisprudence "has no basis in the Constitution." Nadine Strossen, president of the ACLU at the time, pointed out that "no less an anti-abortion proponent than Justice Scalia joined by Justice Thomas, in his separate opinion, chided the majority for not coming out and explicitly saying that they had overturned not Roe v. Wade, but the prior partial-birth abortion ban case." [16]
Joined by justices David Souter, John Paul Stevens, and Stephen Breyer, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, [17] contending that the ruling was an "alarming" one that ignored Supreme Court abortion precedent and "refuse[d] to take Casey and Stenberg seriously." Referring in particular to Planned Parenthood v. Casey , Ginsburg sought to ground the Court's abortion jurisprudence based on concepts of personal autonomy and equal citizenship rather than the Court's previous privacy approach: "Thus, legal challenges to undue restrictions on abortion procedures do not seek to vindicate some generalized notion of privacy; rather, they center on a woman's autonomy to determine her life's course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature." [2]
Ginsburg also took issue with the lack of a health exception, writing that "the absence of a health exception burdens all women for whom it is relevant—women who, in the judgment of their doctors, require an intact D&E because other procedures would place their health at risk." In general, the dissent criticized the usurpation of medical decision-making by legislators and the minimization of "the reasoned medical judgments of highly trained doctors ... as 'preferences' motivated by 'mere convenience'." [5]
Observing that the majority opinion in Carhart did not touch upon the question of whether the Court's prior decisions in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey were valid, Justice Ginsburg wrote, "Casey's principles, confirming the continuing vitality of 'the essential holding of Roe,' are merely 'assume[d]' for the moment ... rather than 'retained' or 'reaffirmed.'" She concluded by criticizing the majority for abandoning the principle of stare decisis , writing that "a decision so at odds with our jurisprudence should not have staying power."
According to an ABC News poll, the majority of Americans (69%) oppose the legality of D&X or what opponents call "partial-birth" abortion. [18]
Some medical groups expressed concern that the Court, in supporting the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, endorsed the substitution of congressional legislation for medical judgment. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which had submitted an amicus brief opposing the Act, described the Court's decision as "shameful and incomprehensible", ignorant of medical consensus, and chilling for the medical profession. [19] The New England Journal of Medicine criticized the intrusion of politicians into medical decision-making, writing:
Until this opinion, the Court recognized the importance of not interfering with medical judgments made by physicians to protect a patient's interest. For the first time, the Court permits congressional judgment to replace medical judgment. [5]
Professor and academic Geoffrey R. Stone has argued that the religion of Supreme Court judges played an important role in the decision, given that the five judges in the majority were Roman Catholic. [20]
Intact dilation and extraction is a surgical procedure that terminates and removes an intact fetus from the uterus. The procedure is used both after miscarriages and for abortions in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy.
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States generally protected a right to have an abortion. The decision struck down many abortion laws, and caused an ongoing abortion debate in the United States about whether, or to what extent, abortion should be legal, who should decide the legality of abortion, and what the role of moral and religious views in the political sphere should be. The decision also shaped debate concerning which methods the Supreme Court should use in constitutional adjudication. The Supreme Court repealed the Roe decision in June 2022, ending the constitutional right to abortion.
Antonin Gregory Scalia was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative wing. For catalyzing an originalist and textualist movement in American law, he has been described as one of the most influential jurists of the twentieth century, and one of the most important justices in the history of the Supreme Court. Scalia was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018, and the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University was named in his honor.
Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court upheld the right to have an abortion as established by the "essential holding" of Roe v. Wade (1973) and issued as its "key judgment" the restoration of the undue burden standard when evaluating state-imposed restrictions on that right. Both the essential holding of Roe and the key judgment of Casey were overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022, with its landmark decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.
The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 is a United States law prohibiting a form of late termination of pregnancy called "partial-birth abortion", referred to in medical literature as intact dilation and extraction. Under this law, any physician "who, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, knowingly performs a partial-birth abortion and thereby kills a human fetus shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both". The law was enacted in 2003, and in 2007 its constitutionality was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Gonzales v. Carhart.
Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. is an American jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated to the high court by President George W. Bush on October 31, 2005, and has served on it since January 31, 2006. After Antonin Scalia, Alito is the second Italian American justice to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Stenberg v. Carhart, 530 U.S. 914 (2000), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court dealing with a Nebraska law which made performing "partial-birth abortion" illegal, without regard for the health of the mother. Nebraska physicians who performed the procedure contrary to the law were subject to having their medical licenses revoked. The Court struck down the law, finding the Nebraska statute criminalizing "partial birth abortion[s]" violated the Due Process Clause of the United States Constitution, as interpreted in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Roe v. Wade.
LeRoy Harrison Carhart was an American physician and abortionist from New Jersey best known for performing abortions late in pregnancy. He was known for his participation in the Supreme Court cases Stenberg v. Carhart and Gonzales v. Carhart, both of which dealt with intact dilation and extraction. A former Republican, he was one of the four subjects of the 2013 documentary After Tiller.
Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, 546 U.S. 320 (2006), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States involving a facial challenge to New Hampshire's parental notification abortion law. The First Circuit had ruled that the law was unconstitutional and an injunction against its enforcement was proper. The Supreme Court vacated this judgment and remanded the case, but avoided a substantive ruling on the challenged law or a reconsideration of prior Supreme Court abortion precedent. Instead, the Court only addressed the issue of remedy, holding that invalidating a statute in its entirety "is not always necessary or justified, for lower courts may be able to render narrower declaratory and injunctive relief."
Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702 (1997), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, which unanimously held that a right to assisted suicide in the United States was not protected by the Due Process Clause.
Colorado Right To Life (CRTL) is an American anti-abortion advocacy group based in the state of Colorado. CRTL believes all human beings not convicted of a capital crime have a right to life from the moment of fertilization until natural death. The organization is opposed to abortion and euthanasia, as well as any kind of birth control that functions as an abortifacient or embryonic stem cell research that causes the death of an embryo.
Richard Conway Casey was a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Casey gained national prominence for his unusual personal circumstances — during his years on the bench, he was completely blind — and for his aggressive questioning during a 2004 trial considering the constitutionality of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. He died on March 22, 2007.
Anthony McLeod Kennedy is an American attorney and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1988 until his retirement in 2018. He was nominated to the court in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan, and sworn in on February 18, 1988. After the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor in 2006, he was considered the swing vote on many of the Roberts Court's 5–4 decisions.
Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, 579 U.S. 582 (2016), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court announced on June 27, 2016. The Court ruled 5–3 that Texas cannot place restrictions on the delivery of abortion services that create an undue burden for women seeking an abortion. On June 28, 2016, the Supreme Court refused to hear challenges from Wisconsin and Mississippi where federal appeals courts had enjoined the enforcement of similar laws.
June Medical Services, LLC v. Russo, 591 U.S. ___ (2020), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled that a Louisiana state law placing hospital-admission requirements on abortion clinics doctors was unconstitutional. The law mirrored a Texas state law that the Court found unconstitutional in 2016 in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt (WWH).
Abortion in Nebraska is legal up to the 12th week of pregnancy, after new legislation was signed in May 2023. In June 2023, a lawsuit was filed to challenge the state's abortion law. The legislation establishing the law contained provisions concerning both abortion and gender-affirming care, while the state constitution prohibits bills that legislate on multiple issues at once.
Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Inc., No. 18-483, 587 U.S. ___, 139 S.Ct. 1780 (2019), was a United States Supreme Court case dealing with the constitutionality of a 2016 anti-abortion law passed in the state of Indiana. Indiana's law sought to ban abortions performed solely on the basis of the fetus' gender, race, ethnicity, or disabilities. Lower courts had blocked enforcement of the law for violating a woman's right to abortion under privacy concerns within the Fourteenth Amendment, as previously found in the landmark cases Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The lower courts also blocked enforcement of another portion of the law that required the disposal of aborted fetuses through burial or cremation. The per curiam decision by the Supreme Court overturned the injunction on the fetal disposal portion of the law, but otherwise did not challenge or confirm the lower courts' ruling on the non-discrimination clauses, leaving these in place.
Mazurek v. Armstrong, 520 U.S. 968 (1997), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld a Montana law permitting only licensed physicians to perform abortions. The Court summarily reversed a ruling of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that had held that the law was likely intended to inhibit abortion access. In a per curiam opinion, a majority of the Court found that there was no evidence that the Montana legislature acted with an invalid intent. The Court also reiterated its earlier holding in Planned Parenthood v. Casey that the states have broad flexibility to regulate abortion so long as their regulations do not create an undue burden on a woman's right to choose. Three dissenting justices, in an opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens, wrote that they would have declined to hear the case because proceedings were still pending in the lower courts. The law itself was later struck down by the Montana Supreme Court on state-constitutional grounds.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022), is a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the court held that the Constitution of the United States does not confer a right to abortion. The court's decision overruled both Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), returning to individual states the power to regulate any aspect of abortion not protected by federal statutory law.
Whole Woman's Health v. Jackson, 595 U.S. ___ (2021), was a United States Supreme Court case brought by Texas abortion providers and abortion rights advocates that challenged the constitutionality of the Texas Heartbeat Act, a law that outlaws abortions after six weeks. The Texas Heartbeat Act prohibits state officials from enforcing the ban but authorizes private individuals to enforce the law by suing anyone who performs, aids, or abets an abortion after six weeks. The law was structured this way to evade pre-enforcement judicial review because lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of state statutes are typically brought against state officials who are charged with enforcing the law, as the state itself cannot be sued under the doctrine of sovereign immunity.