Copyright 2000 The Washington Post
The Washington
Post
April 4, 2000, Tuesday, Final Edition
Correction Appended
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A02
LENGTH: 484 words
HEADLINE:
Administration Left Out Of Abortion Rights Case; Supreme Court Denies Bid to
Join Oral Arguments
BYLINE: Joan Biskupic , Washington
Post Staff Writer
BODY:
As the Supreme
Court prepares to hear its first abortion rights case in eight years, the
justices issued a surprising order yesterday rejecting the Clinton
administration's request to participate in oral arguments in the closely watched
Nebraska case.
The justices denied Solicitor General Seth P. Waxman's
motion to argue on the side of a physician challenging the constitutionality of
Nebraska's ban on what it calls "partial birth" abortions.
The court rarely spurns the federal government's request for time during
oral arguments. In this case, lawyers for the Nebraska physician had agreed to
give the solicitor general 10 minutes of their 30-minute allotment for the April
25 arguments. In the most recent major abortion disputes, in 1989 and 1992,
lawyers representing the Bush administration were given time to defend state
abortion regulations. There were rare occasions in which the Bush administration
declined to seek time in an abortion case and, in the Reagan administration,
when the solicitor general was not allowed to participate at oral argument.
Yesterday's action in Stenberg v. Carhart appears to mark the first time
that an administration has sought time to speak in favor of a woman's right to
end her pregnancy and against an abortion restriction. Waxman last week
submitted a written brief arguing that the Nebraska law was too broad,
prohibiting procedures that the high court has previously upheld.
The
justices offered no explanation in their order, which noted that the government
provides abortion services in certain programs (for example, the Indian Health
Service and Bureau of Prisons) and that President Clinton twice has vetoed a
federal "partial birth" abortion ban enacted by Congress.
The court may
have believed the federal interest in the state dispute was insufficient. Or
perhaps the justices did not want to raise the political stakes this election
year. In 1992, when the court upheld abortion rights, key justices noted with
some annoyance that five times in the past decade presidents had asked the court
to reverse Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that made abortion legal nationwide.
The Nebraska law, which has variations in about 30 states, forbids a
procedure that it defines as "partially deliver[ing] vaginally a living unborn
child before killing the unborn child and completing the delivery." Lawmakers
said they were targeting a technique that involves dilating a pregnant woman's
cervix to allow the fetus to partially emerge, then killing the fetus by
inserting a suction tube into its skull and removing the contents. But when the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit struck down the statute, it declared
that the vaguely worded law had a broader reach and affected other medical
procedures. The appeals court said the statute would effectively prohibit the
most common method of second-trimester abortion.
CORRECTION-DATE: April 5, 2000
CORRECTION:
An attribution of a statement to
Solicitor General Seth P. Waxman was mistakenly dropped from an April 4 article
on the Supreme Court's denial of a federal government request to take part in
arguments in an abortion rights case. It was Waxman, not the Supreme Court, who
noted that the government provides abortion services in certain programs and
that President Clinton twice has vetoed a "partial birth" abortion ban enacted
by Congress.
LOAD-DATE: April 04, 2000
