How did the courts of appeals rule on the federal PBA ban?
Three federal appellate courts reviewed the federal partial-birth abortion ban: the United States Courts of Appeals for the Second, Eighth and Ninth Circuit, which sit in New York, St. Louis, and San Francisco, respectively. In all three cases, the courts invalidated the federal statute because it lacks a general “health” exception. One court, the Ninth Circuit, also concluded that the statute is constitutionally defective in the way it is drafted (too broadly and too vaguely, in the court’s view, to ban only partial-birth abortion or to give sufficient notice of what is banned). The Supreme Court has agreed to review the decisions of the Eighth and Ninth Circuits. The Second Circuit case has yet to work its way up to this level. What is the USCCB’s legal position on the PBA ban? In May 2006 the Conference, joined by a number of other religious organizations, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in Gonzales v. Carhart, the first of the two PBA cases before the Court: www.usccb.org/ogc/Alb
