Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her resignation from the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice O'Connor was the fifth and deciding vote to uphold Roe v. Wade in 1992. Her vote meant that the killing of unborn children would remain legal in all 50 states.
Justice O'Connor was also the deciding vote in a 5-4 decision to keep partial-birth abortion legal. And she was the swing vote in a 5-4 decision to curtail the free speech rights of pro-lifers to lobby on behalf of unborn children in the McCain-Feingold campaign reform case.
President Bush will now nominate a new justice, who must survive the minefield of Senate confirmation. Senators Boxer, Leahy, Schumer, Clinton, Kennedy and others will stand in the way. In some ways the coming fight to confirm a true constructionist who respects the words and real meaning of the Constitution will be every bit as bitter as the fight to confirm Robert Bork in 1987.
And we lost that fight. And because we lost that fight, abortion has remained legal through all nine months of pregnancy in the United States.
There are three critically important things you can do to help President Bush get a new Supreme Court justice confirmed:
1. Please contribute to National Right to Life's grassroots effort to confirm President Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court. Pro- abortion groups like Planned Parenthood, NARAL and People for the American Way have already begun massive projects to use media, e- mail lists and grassroots campaigns to get the Senate to stall and defeat any judge who respects the Constitution as written. They know they need activist judges to continue to legislate from the bench if they want to keep a so-called “constitutional right†to abortion.
Please help National Right to Life advertise, lobby and activate the pro-life grassroots in our campaign by donating through NRLC's website, www.nrlc.org; or by phoning our office to donate by credit card at 202-626-8813; or by sending a generous contribution to National Right to Life, 512 10th St., NW, Washington, D.C. 20004.
2. Call your two U.S. Senators now and ask them to vote for a justice who will interpret the words and actual meaning of the Constitution, not legislate from the bench.
The phone number for the U.S. Capitol switchboard is 202-224-2421.
3. Please forward this important e-mail message to every pro-life friend and every person you know who cares about the integrity of the U.S. Constitution.
Again, please visit our website at www.nrlc.org to donate to our grassroots campaign, and thank you for all you can do to help us protect unborn children at this critical time.
Millions of Americans will be watching to see whether the Senate Democratic leadership bows to the demands of certain pressure groups that a nominee must pledge to rule for the pro-abortion side in future cases, stated NRLC political director Carol Tobias. Already, some Democratic senators, such as Ted Kennedy, are clearly demanding a litmus test.
Many commentators in the news media have made observations about the possible impact of an appointment on legal issues pertaining to abortion. Some of these commentaries are well informed, but others contain misinformation and distortions. For example, one oft-heard myth is that the current Supreme Court is divided 5-4 on Roe v. Wade. This is demonstrably wrong. In reality, six of the current justices, including Justice O'Connor, have voted to reaffirm Roe v. Wade's holding that abortion must be allowed, for any reason, up until "viability" (and for "health" reasons, which has been broadly defined, even after viability).
Thus, even if the President were to appoint a successor justice who some day decides that Roe v. Wade was an unconstitutional ruling, there would still be a pro-Roe majority on the Supreme Court.
The misconception that the Supreme Court is divided 5-4 on Roe was refuted by the Annenberg's Center's Factcheck.org here.
The Supreme Court is clearly divided 5-4 on one critical abortion issue -- Â partial-birth abortion, Tobias said.
In the 2000 case of Stenberg v. Carhart, O'Connor voted with the five-justice majority that struck down state laws that banned the brutal partial-birth abortion method, in which a living premature infant is mostly delivered alive before being killed by puncturing her skull and removing her brain. (Justice Kennedy, a vote in favor of Roe's doctrine of legal abortion for any reason, nevertheless felt it was constitutionally permissible for a state to ban the particular METHOD of partial-birth abortion.) In 2003, President Bush signed into law a federal ban on partial-birth abortion (except to save the life of the mother), but its enforcement has been blocked by the lower federal courts in litigation that is headed back up to the Supreme Court. The President's nominee may very well cast the deciding vote to determine whether the brutal partial-birth abortion method will remain legal.
Much of the public has also been misled into believing that "overturning Roe v. Wade" means "banning all abortions." In reality, the effect of even a complete overturning of Roe would be to place questions relating to protection of unborn children and abortion into the hands of elected lawmakers and the American people, rather than a small group of unelected judges. As the leading pro-abortion litigation group expressed it last year: "A Supreme Court decision overturning Roe would not by itself make abortion illegal in the United States. Instead, a reversal of Roe would remove federal constitutional protection for a woman's right to choose and give the states the power to set abortion policy."
("What if Roe Fell?," Center for Reproductive Rights, September 2004)
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her resignation from the U.S.