Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took a thinly veiled swipe at her colleague, Justice Anthony Kennedy, over a 2007 ruling against partial-birth abortion.
Her interview published Sunday in The New Republic with Jeffrey Rosen includes this exchange:
JR: And for dissents, your Gonzalez v. Carhart dissent is quite memorable.
RBG: That was in a partial-birth abortion case. And there what concerned me about the Court’s attitude, they were looking at the woman as not really an adult individual. The opinion said that the woman would live to regret her choice. That was not anything this Court should have thought or said. Adult women are able to make decisions about their own lives’ course no less than men are. So, yes, I thought in Carhart the Court was way out of line. It was a new form of “Big Brother must protect the woman against her own weakness and immature misjudgment.”
Kennedy was the author of that 5-4 ruling, which upheld the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. In the opinion, he wrote that “it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.”
Interestingly, a law review article published in August 2014 found that Kennedy’s citation for that claim was sketchy. He based it on a friend-of-the-court brief which relied on the work of an anti-abortion advocate which has been discredited by authorities like the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association.
As Ginsburg noted elsewhere in the interview, Kennedy was one of the three justices who co-wrote the controlling opinion upholding abortion rights in the 1992 Supreme Court case Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
The SupremeCorporation K-RATS
(kennedy-roberts,alito,thomas,scalia)
Willing to destroy the Constitution…
Kennedy will go down as one of the worst, despite some earlier rulings that were fairly good, and here’s why: he’s the man poised to be the “decider” in the Court, with the right decisions staring him in the face, and he’s been consistently making the wrong ones lately. It’s an abominable failure on his part. He’s become an old man lamenting the loss of the world he grew up in and the mark he apparently wants to leave on history is apparently of the "skid’ variety…leaving a messy stank legacy of trying to turn back the clock at the end of his career while fully succumbing to being a dupe for the radicalized conservative movement’s inane arguments…
Isn’t that what Government and politicians do to all of us on a regular basis? Telling people what’s best for them? Nothing new under the sun, RGB.
Right on, RBG. Right on. You have named the problem very neatly and succinctly. There are a bunch of Catholic men on the court who let their religious beliefs cloud their judgment on legal matters. It is pathetically obvious that they are in no position to judge whether a woman might “regret” her decision, and anyway that is not what they were called upon to rule on in that case.
I, for one, thank God for her presence on this court.
Ruthie’s getting feisty, isn’t she? You go, girl!