Opinion ID: 1029238
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Present

Text: Controversy over abortion has raged in the decades since Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 93 S.Ct. 705, 35 L.Ed.2d 147 (1973). In truth, the matter of early-term abortions is a difficult and intractable one. On one hand, the choice of a female to abort a fetus is not only intimate but agonizing. No one wants to see a ban drive young women into unsafe circumstances. I understand the argument too that a momentary lapse in judgment should not be the occasion for severe burdens that may handicap a woman's education and career throughout life. See Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U.S. at 171-72, 127 S.Ct. 1610 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting). On the other hand, it is unsettling to tamper with the most sacred of life's cycles and disquieting for those here on earth to pull the ladder up on those who would join the human company. But it is one thing to say that abortions present difficult questions as a matter of policy, and quite another to say that those questions should be resolved as a matter of constitutional law. Indeed, the very difficulty of the issue commends itself to legislative compromise. It is in representative bodies where those who support and those who oppose abortion have the best chance for an airing of their honest beliefs. Planned Parenthood of Se. Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 1002, 112 S.Ct. 2791, 120 L.Ed.2d 674 (1992) (Scalia, J., concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part). Those who would strike Virginia's statute as unconstitutional would take from them that chance and allow the people little voice on an issue where moral, religious, and philosophical beliefs have taken such deep root. The majority and dissenting opinions in this case agree that the state may proscribe an intact D & E  in which an intact fetus is partially delivered and then killedthat is intended from the outset. They disagree, however, as to whether the state may also proscribe deliberately killing a fetus if a standard D & E  in which the fetus is meant to be extracted from the uterus in piecesaccidentally becomes an intact D&E and if the life of the mother is not then in danger. To invalidate Virginia's statute on its face solely because it applies in this highly unusual circumstance is to say that courts have the ability not merely to create non-textual rights but to oversee their infinite permutations. To say further that the Virginia legislature cannot act to preserve humane ideals of protecting life not only traduces the views of past generations but denies present generations the opportunity to act upon the best and noblest of impulses.