Facial Cruelty vs. Facial Constitutionality

The Supreme Court recently upheld Congress's passage of a ban on "partial birth abortion."

The heart of the opinion is description of the surgical procedure called "dilation and extraction" or ("D & E") by doctors. What the pro-life movement has succeeded in calling "partial birth abortion" is a procedure by which the intact fetus is extracted from the womb and then intentionally killed. The alternate, and still lawful procedure, is to dismember the fetus in the womb and extract the pieces--or to perform a mini-Cesarean.

After the Supreme Court overturned state laws banning the procedure, Congress passed a law prohibiting it. (As the opinion points out, no one has litigated the question of whether Congress even has the power to regulate the practice of medicine). The present opinion (Gonzalez v. Carhart) rejects lower court decisions that upheld a challenge to the federal law. The challengers claimed that the statute was "unconstitutional on its face," in other words, the text of the law itself violates the constitution. For example, a law that required all Texans to attend Baptist churches or pay a fine would be facially unconstitutional; a court would not need to examine how the law was enforced to find it was unconstitutional. In "unconstitutional as applied" cases, the court has to look at actual instances of enforcement to determine whether constitutional rights have been affected.

In this case, the Court concluded that because existing opinions hold that the government has an interest in protecting fetal life stronger later in the pregnancy, and there are still abortion procedures available at this stage of pregnancy, the law was not unconstitutional.

A read of the opinion, however, suggests to me that like the congressmen and senators who adopted it, the justices in the majority were stricken by the cruelty of the procedure.

There was a recent episode of the TV program "House" in which a problem pregnancy results in a very premature delivery. The tiny hand and arm of the baby are depicted. It is, of course, very moving, at least to anyone who has been close to a pregnancy or learned to love babies. So long as the tiny hand is not an abstraction, late-term abortion will have a constituency only among the most zealous advocates of abortion rights.

The Anniversary of Roe v. Wade

Apparently today is the anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade.

Although in the past I have taken the view that it is imprudent for the state to ban abortion, I have long believed that the Roe decision was poorly reasoned and politically disastrous. I began a series of posts on Roe, but sad to say haven't brought the analysis up to the Roe ruling itself and the equally important Webster case.

In my view, issues of this kind should be resolved through the constitutional political system, by the legislative process (or in some states, the initiative, which is fraught with other difficulties). When unelected, or even nominally elected judges, use legal reasoning that's impenetrable to the mind of the average citizen, to impose their views on highly charged subjects such as abortion, the political process is thwarted, the losers feel cheated and put upon, and the legitimacy of the system suffers.

Before Roe, the country was drifting in the direction of a less restrictive approach to abortion, and if Roe is overruled, the political process will resume. In some states, such as California, which has placed a "right of privacy" in its Constitution, a permissive approach to the issue will prevail; in others, more conservative, some degree of restriction is likely to be enacted. Even supposedly conservative South Dakota refused, this last election, to enact an absolute abortion ban with no exception for rape or incest.

I've also grown increasingly uncomfortable with the cultural consequences of a relaxed approach to abortion. I remember the sorrow when my wife miscarried, before our first child was born healthy. As potential viability becomes possible earlier in a pregnancy, late-term abortion becomes more and more akin to infanticide. Looking at the results of sex-selection abortions in Asia (millions of men who will be unable to marry, because the babies who would have grown up to be their wives were aborted, among other things), the creepily casual way in which technology is used and misused in reproductive matters, and other changes, few of them good, in the culture, I am increasingly troubled. In addition, rather than overpopulation, the developed world appears to be facing rapid population decline, as well as a decline in family life.

It appears to me more and more that we, and I in particular, have gone astray in these matters and the easy acceptance of abortion looks to be one of the reasons. There is much to answer for.

What Roe Is All About II (Incorporation and Privacy)

This piece is reproduced from my personal blog. It was written in October 2005, and is second in a series, still incomplete, on Roe vs. Wade, looked at from a legal, not a political or moral perspective. My earlier discussion is here.

I

Remember that we ended the Introduction with a discussion of the Fourteenth Amendment's ban on the states acting against the newly-minted ex-slave citizens, or any citizens by Denying them the privileges and immunities of citizens Depriving them of life liberty or property without due process of law; or Denying them the equal protection of the laws. All of this sounded good, and to the Radical Republicans who enacted the Fourteenth Amendment, had a clear intent of protecting the ex-slaves.

Within a few years, however, interest in affording much protection to the ex-slaves waned, and with the compromise arising out of the disputed 1876 election, Rutherford Hayes was allowed to carry Florida in exchange for a promise to end Reconstruction and give the white South a free hand with respect to the Negroes, who were relegated once again to a condition of subordination.

By 1896, the Supreme Court held in Plessy v. Ferguson that a state could enforce racial segregation in railroad cars, provided the facilities provided to each race were equal. In other areas, however, the Supreme Court found that certain rights of individuals and of corporations (fictitious legal "persons") under the federal constitution applied, under the Fourteenth Amendment, also to the states. The key case for this principle is Lochner v. New York. Lochner held unconstitutional a law of New York that forbade employers from making bakers work more than 60 hours in a week. The court held that a "freedom of contract" that the Fourteenth Amendment imposed upon the states trumped the states' inherent police power, and made it unconstitutional for a state to regulate the hours of work of bakers, even though restrictions on the hours of work of miners and others by other states had been upheld on health and safety grounds. The Supreme Court held that no such restriction on the work of bakers was justified by such health considerations.

This doctrine in Lochner has been labeled "substantive due process." In other words, it is not a case of a right being taken away without proper notice and procedures ("procedural due process"), but the content of the law itself the Court found offensive to the Constitution. In the economic sphere, substantive due process survived little more than 30 years. It was tossed out during the New Deal, when government regulation of the economy, in the face of the Great Depression, once again became fashionable. But Lochner is most emphatically not dead in non-economic spheres. Increasingly, the court has held, whether or not the focus is the Fourteenth Amendment's original one of race that the rights enumerated in the first ten amendments, much, if not all, of the "Bill of Rights" now applies to the states because the Fourteenth Amendment makes it so. Reams of paper have been covered with arguments as to which aspects of the Bill of Rights are "incorporated" or applied to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment.

II.

The other abstract concept needed to understand the legal arguments about Roe is the "right of privacy." In American jurisprudence, the concept of a "right of privacy" is generally traced back to an article by later Supreme Court Justice Brandeis and his law partner Samuel Warren in the Harvard Law Review. Brandeis and Warren wrote not about highfalutin' constitutional law, but about the law of torts, a tort being a civil wrong not arising out of a contract, for which suit may be brought. Brandeis and Warren argue that there is ample justification for the common law, as it does from time to time, to create a new tort, whereby damages and more rarely, an injunction, could be obtained for unauthorized publication of private facts, even if truthful. The article does not address the question of whether the constitution itself contains (or does not contain) an implied right of privacy. Brandeis and Warren's "privacy" deals more with protection against the likes of paparazzi than against state legislation:

Of the desirability -- indeed of the necessity -- of some such protection, there can, it is believed, be no doubt. The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency. Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade, which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery. To satisfy a prurient taste the details of sexual relations are spread broadcast in the columns of the daily papers. To occupy the indolent, column upon column is filled with idle gossip, which can only be procured by intrusion upon the domestic circle. The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury.

As we shall see, it is this concept of privacy, brought into the constitutional law and imposed on the states through the Fourteenth Amendment "incorporation" doctrine, that provided the initial rationale for Roe. Whether "privacy" can be found in the Bill of Rights, whether "incorporation" applies a right of privacy to the states, and whether abortion is within the scope of any such right of privacy, are all questions which must wait for further posts.

What Roe Is All About--Introduction

(First posted February 14, 2006)

Last October, on my personal blog, when the Supreme Court appointments began to be an issue, I began a series, still unfinished, about the legal issues in the endless battle about Roe v. Wade, the case in which the Supreme Court found that the Constitution forbids the states from making it a crime to interrupt a pregnancy, especially in its early stages.

I thought to focus on the constitutional issues, as opposed to the moral and political aspects of the issue. I’ve slightly revised this post for my law blog, and I’ll be posting the remaining sections from time to time. Nevertheless, I do think it’s important to begin by saying that if I were a legislator, I'd vote in agreement with what most Americans believe. It would be a mistake for the government to forbid all abortions, when there is no consensus among the people. However, abortion should be regulated, especially in the later stages of pregnancy when a premature birth might result in a baby capable of survival.

I don't think abortion in the early stages of pregnancy is the same as murder. That's a theological or philosophical debate to which I don't have much to contribute, but before I begin discussing the Constitutional aspects of the issue, it's best to lay at least that much on the table.

This approach--allowing abortion but restricting it-- would probably be the law in most states if the Supreme Court had never been involved in the issue, and the noise of the controversy would be far less loud. Why? Because the political process would have taken effect, and changing public attitudes would be reflected in law. No doubt Utah and a few Bible Belt states would outlaw abortion entirely, and others would restrict it. Others, like California, have put a "right of privacy" into their constitutions that was intended, among other things, to limit the state's ability to interfere with abortion. As Justice Ginsburg long ago observed, the effect of the Roe decision was to cut short the political conflict.

The debate has now metastasized into a debate not only about constitutional law, but about the role of the Supreme Court and how justices should be selected. Our Constitution gives the federal government limited powers, and the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, places specific restrictions on the feds' ability to do things like promulgate a state religion and tell newspapers what to print. Originally, these restrictions did not limit the powers of state governments, which were sovereign. After the Civil War, a Congress purged of rebels passed three constitutional amendments. One, the Fourteenth, was designed to insure that freed slaves became full citizens, and thus provided that persons born or naturalized in this country were citizens of the states where they reside. It also did other post-war things, such as invalidate the Confederate debt, that are rarely spoken of today.

The language of the Fourteenth Amendment relevant to our discussion is this:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

For the first time, the Constitution limited what the states could do. The original idea was to protect the freed slaves. As we shall see, that ideas has stretched quite a bit beyond that intention since. What were the "privileges and immunities" so protected, what were the protected "life, liberty, [and] property" and what was "equal protection of the laws"? The language is general, and when language is general, lawyers prance, preen and saunter. Where this legal horsing around has led our constitutional law, is something I’ll take up in a later post in this series.

UPDATE: My views on the moral questions involved have evolved somewhat. I am becoming persuaded that the moral criticism of abortion holds weight, as do the "slippery slope" and demographic concerns many express about a socially permissive view. This doesn't necessarily change either the constitutional analysis or the political question.