Issues of the Case

The issues of this partial-birth abortion case, was whether or not it was clear enough for the doctors to be able to differentiate what abortion procedures were covered under the law and what weren’t.

Doctors claim this is a necessary procedure. They are in the business of saving lives, why do they feel obligated to kill the innocent?
In an interview conducted by Chief Justice Roberts with Mr. Clement, a representatives for the doctors who performed these operations, when asked:

Justice Kennedy: Well, my question is the same as Justice Breyer's.
Is there anything in the literature, including medical literature, that talks about significant or minor risks?
I mean, you fill out forms when you go to the dentist about risks.
Now, if... if the chance of death is one out of 100, is that significant?
I mean, I don't know.

His response was:

Mr. Clement: Well, it's a very difficult question to evaluate in the abstract, Justice Kennedy.
And I think it actually, that question, though, has direct bearing on this case, because Congress after all found that there was some risks with the D&X procedure.
The most prominent one that I would point to is the risk of cervical incompetence because the D&X procedure does... it does require additional dilation, which can be associated with risks of losing future pregnancies.
And that was born out, although not at a level of statistical significance, in the Chasen study by a plaintiff practitioner, where 2 of the 17 women who had the D&X procedure and were available for follow up care had an early preterm pregnancy in the follow up.
So I think those risks are born out in the only study that's available.
And I think the question becomes, now, if D&X were some life saving procedure for something that there was no other known cure for, you might think, well, those are the risks you run.
But when there remains available the D&E procedure, which has been well tested and works every single time as a way to terminate the pregnancy, then I think risks that, if you were talking about a life saving treatment for some life threatening condition with no known cure, those risks might not be significant in that context.
(Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood - Oral Argument http://www.oyez.org/cases/2000-2009/2006/2006_05_1382/argument/)

If these people know of the risks, yet deem them insignificant, how can they be trusted?
These are the people you trust with your health on a daily basis.