Nebraska abortion provider LeRoy Carhart, M.D. said today that he intends to provide late-second trimester and third trimester abortions to Kansas patients that would previously have been only able to seek such procedures from the recently murdered Dr. George Tiller. Much like Dr. Tiller, Dr. Carhart has fought a valiant and dangerous legal and personal battle to preserve abortion rights for his patients and for women nationwide.
If Carhart’s name sounds familiar to the legal types out there, it’s
probably because he was the person who challenged Nebraska’s law
prohibiting dilation and extraction abortions (commonly known as
partial birth abortions), which resulted in the 2000 SCOTUS decision Stenberg v. Carhart
that declared such state laws to be an unconstitutional restriction
upon abortion. Sadly, Dr. Carhart also served as the plaintiff in the
challenge to the later-passed federal law prohibiting such procedures,
which resulted in the 2007 SCOTUS decision Gonzales v. Carhart that essentially overruled Stenberg
by turning back the constitutional challenge to the federal law. (The
SCOTUS makeup had changed considerably in the intervening 7 years, with
Justice O’Connor being replaced by Justice Alito.)
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