White House Seeks to Join Carhart Case

March 31, 2000

White House Seeks to Join Carhart Case

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Washington (AP) - The Clinton administration is asking the Supreme Court to let it join a Nebraska doctor's fight against a state abortion law.

Justice Department lawyers asked the nation's highest court this week to let them participate when the Nebraska case is argued before the justices the week of April 24. They said the law violates some women's constitutional right to end their pregnancies.

The court's decision in the case may determine the fate of 30 states' bans on the late-term procedure opponents call "partial-birth" abortion and which is known medically as intact dilation and extraction.

President Clinton twice has vetoed a federal ban enacted by Congress.

The court has not yet said whether it will let the administration participate in the argument, but in a friend-of-the-court brief made public Thursday government lawyers called the Nebraska law "unconstitutional for three reasons."

The brief says the law challenged by Bellevue doctor LeRoy Carhart is written so broadly that it could be enforced against more than one abortion procedure and is too vague to let doctors know just what abortion techniques are outlawed.

Even if the law is limited to a single procedure, the brief says, it unduly burdens a woman's right to abortion because "it fails to provide an exception to preserve the pregnant woman's health. The only exception to Nebraska's ban is if the outlawed procedure is necessary to save a woman's life."

"The statute therefore prohibits the . . . method even when a physician concludes that that method is best suited to preserve the health of a particular woman," the brief says. "The ban therefore forces at least some pregnant women to forgo a safer abortion method for one that would compromise their health."

The surgical procedure involves partly extracting a fetus, legs first, then cutting the skull and draining it to allow full removal from the uterus.

Abortion-rights advocates say the court's decision could broadly safeguard or dramatically erode abortion rights, depending on what state legislatures can consider when regulating abortions.

A federal appeals court struck down the Nebraska law along with Iowa and Arkansas laws. But nearly identical laws in Illinois and Wisconsin were up-held by another federal appeals court.