Our view: Without exception for women's health, ban on abortion procedure favors morals over medicine

In 2003, when it passed the strategically named Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, the Republican-led Congress decided it knew more about women's health than the people more often associated with medical expertise: doctors. On Wednesday, Congress was joined in its arrogant assumption by a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court.

And thus a movement supposedly dedicated to championing "life" has codified just how little it cares about the lives of vulnerable and, yes, pregnant women. They care so much they would wedge an ideology and politicians in between a physician and patient.

Wednesday's majority opinion, penned by Justice Anthony Kennedy of Sacramento, is the first time the Supreme Court has allowed an abortion procedure to be outlawed. Now that retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has yielded her gavel to the more conservative Samuel Alito, you can bet it won't be the last.

Most troubling is the ruling's lack of an exception for a woman's health - which lays bare just how far back the Supreme Court has set the cause of women's rights and health.

What opponents call "partial-birth abortion" is called intact dilation and extraction in medical practice. Granted, it's an abhorrent procedure - so much so that by itself it justifies the "rare" part of the "safe, legal and rare" formula favored by abortion-rights supporters. It is also rarely used, accounting for less than 1 percent of all abortions in 2000, according to the abortion-rights-supporting Guttmacher Institute.

But Kennedy's opinion not only adopts the nonscientific language of the religious right - instead of a fetus, it talks of an "unborn child, a child assuming the human form" and of carrying "the infant to full term" - it also privileges a moral diagnosis of a woman's supposed mental and moral health over her very real, very dire physical health. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which represents about 90 percent of the physicians in those specialties, endorses the procedure as medically necessary in some cases to save the pregnant woman's life. To save her life.

It's no coincidence that the court's lone woman, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, wrote and spoke the blistering dissent to a decision she called "alarming."

"For the first time since Roe (v. Wade), the court blesses a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman's health," Ginsberg said.

But the court's majority isn't content to play doctor; Kennedy's opinion makes clear they want to play counselor and spiritual adviser to suffering women, as well. Kennedy claims, "It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event," the gruesome nature of the abortion she chose.

What is decidedly not "self-evident" is why the courts should uphold a law that overrules physicians based upon nonscientific suppositions of a woman's state of mind.

Wednesday's decision is clearly the green light long sought by those who want to outlaw abortions - and thus sentence pregnant women to health risks, back alleys and unwanted children. Congress must forestall this disastrous return to the dangerous days before Roe v. Wade by repealing the regrettable act of 2003. Women can't wait for the relatively younger conservative justices to leave the bench; they need their rights and reproductive freedoms protected long before then.