Volume 54, Number 9 · May 31, 2007
The Court & Abortion: Worse Than You Think
By Ronald Dworkin
When President Bush nominated Judge Samuel Alito to succeed Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, it was widely expected that the first clear demonstration of an important shift in the Court's ideology would be its reversal of one of its recent abortion decisions. In 2000, O'Connor provided the swing vote in the Court's 5–4 Stenberg v. Carhart decision striking down a Nebraska statute that outlawed the procedure pejoratively described as 'partial-birth abortion.' Congress, dominated by conservative Republicans, then passed in 2003 essentially the same statute in order to provoke another test and, as expected, Alito's replacing O'Connor made the difference.
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