Five justices decide they can practice law and medicine

When Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito faced questions about their opinion of abortion during the confirmation process, neither would answer directly, but both pledged that they would respect legal precedent, including that regarding abortion rights and would put aside their personal views.
It's now fair to ask what else these members of the Supreme Court lied about during the hearings.
Roberts and Alito joined three colleagues last week in overturning a seven-year-old Supreme Court ruling on an abortion procedure known technically as dilation and extraction and in the terminology of abortion opponents as partial birth abortion. It is instructive that Justice Anthony Kennedy chose to use the anti-abortion constituency's terminology in writing his legal opinion. He also, as pointed out in a dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, chose to use the term abortion doctors when referring to the obstetricians and gynecologists who perform abortions. We look forward to the first time Justice Kennedy has the opportunity to write an opinion in a case involving by-pass surgery and he refers to a chest-cracker.
Kennedy's second chance
It is also instructive that Kennedy was given the job of writing the majority opinion in this case, since he wrote the dissent in the 2000 case. It gave him an opportunity to use some of the same language and same reasoning, except that now he had two new votes.
So much for stare decisis, a Latin phrase that means "to stand by what has been decided."
Speaking of Latin, it was deemed politically incorrect when Roberts and Alito were going through the confirmation process to raise the fact that both are practicing Catholics. "There is no religious test in the Constitution" we were told. And, indeed, there isn't.
But now, after a majority of the court has ruled to overturn precedent on a matter of abortion, aren't some people at least a little uneasy with the breakdown of this vote? The five aligned in the majority, Roberts, Kennedy, Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, are all Roman Catholic. The four joining in dissent, Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, David Souter and John Paul Stevens are not.
No issues in American culture are more clearly identified with particular religious viewpoints than abortion, embryonic stem cell research and end-of-life decisions. And on each of those issues, Catholic and fundamentalist Christians are on one side while just about everyone else is on the other side. One side calls itself pro-life, the other pro-choice, but the fact remains that neither has the right to claim God is exclusive to its side. Thousands of American ministers, rabbis and laymen of good conscience do not subscribe to the theology that life begins at the moment of conception or that the life of a person in a vegetative state should be preserved at all costs.
These life and death choices should be made by individuals, their families and their physicians.
Medical reality
There is no question that dilation and extraction is a gruesome procedure. It is difficult not to wince while hearing it described. Most medical procedures, described in detail, would have a similar effect on the average person.
The ability to cut through skin and muscle and bone while maintaining a certain detachment is what separates the surgeon from the rest of us. And it is why medical decisions should be left to doctors and surgeons, not theologians, legislators and justices -- or a combination thereof.
If a doctor determines that a late-term abortion is necessary for the health of a woman -- to protect her against the possibility of organ failure or infertility or other complications -- the method of performing that abortion is between him or her and the patient. Late term abortions, while relatively rare, are sometimes medically necessary. If they are not done by dilation and extraction, they will be done by dilation and evacuation, a procedure that is equally difficult to talk about. Which, again, is why doctors across the country, not people in Washington, should be making treatment decisions.
The Supreme Court's ruling last week was hailed by abortion opponents as a giant step forward. We're afraid it's a step back -- toward the 1960s, when abortion was illegal in the United States and far too many desperate woman were butchered and died at the hands of backroom abortionists.