High Court Gives No Ground on Abortion

Holding to the legal line it has drawn on abortion, the Supreme Court said Monday that states may require the operations to be performed only by doctors, but it refused to reconsider the rule allowing a pregnant woman to choose an abortion until her fetus becomes viable.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court upheld a Montana law that prohibited physician assistants from performing abortions. Similar laws are in effect in California and 39 other states.

In a second action, the justices rejected Utah’s bid to outlaw abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

In the past, the court has said that a woman’s right to abortion continues until the fetus becomes capable of living on its own--a stage of development that comes between 24 and 28 weeks of pregnancy, medical experts say. Utah legislators tried to push back the limit by several weeks, but their law was struck down as unconstitutional.

The two decisions show the high court adhering strictly to the position it adopted in 1992. States may regulate the practice of abortion, the court said then, so long as they do not put an “undue burden” on the right of women to choose to have one within the first six months of pregnancy.

Since then, the justices repeatedly have cut off further litigation challenging that framework. They also have refused to hear arguments in a single case that deals with the right to abortion.

The 1995 Montana law was challenged as an “undue burden” by abortion-rights lawyers representing Dr. James Armstrong and Susan Cahill, his assistant. Cahill was said to be the state’s only physician assistant who had performed abortions before the new law.

A federal judge in Montana rejected the lawsuit on grounds that the high court had allowed doctor-only laws before. But the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco revived the lawsuit for trial, ruling that the challengers had “a fair chance of success.”

In an exasperated tone, the Supreme Court in an unsigned opinion threw out that decision without bothering to hear arguments in the case.

The 9th Circuit’s ruling “is clearly erroneous under our precedents,” the court said in ruling in favor of Montana Atty. Gen. Joseph P. Mazurek. “Our repeated statements in past cases, none of which was so much as cited by the Court of Appeals . . . left no doubt that, to ensure the safety of the abortion procedure, the state may mandate that only physicians perform abortions.”

Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer dissented in the case (Mazurek vs. Armstrong, 96-1104), saying that the court should not have intervened “at this preliminary stage.”

Utah lawmakers sought to forbid abortions after 20 weeks except to save the mother’s life or when the pregnancy threatened “grave damage” to her health.

Lawyers for the same abortion-rights group as in the Montana case, the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy in New York, challenged the measure as an undue burden on pregnant women. They cited examples of unidentified Utah women who had been raped or had mental handicaps and sought abortions after the 20th week of a pregnancy.

The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver agreed and struck down the law.

Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt appealed, urging the court to give states more guidance on whether they may regulate abortion “during the period of time when viability may be reasonably likely but nonetheless uncertain.”

Instead, without comment or dissent, the justices rejected the appeal (Leavitt vs. Jane L., 96-1481).

On an unrelated matter, the court announced that it will hear arguments in the fall on whether a lobbying group that makes more than $1,000 in political contributions must register as a political committee and disclose its donors.

The case, Federal Election Commission vs. Akins, 96-1590, concerns the status of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.