Supreme Court Signals Anti-abortion Shift

The US supreme court signalled a shift towards a more conservative approach to abortion yesterday as it upheld a nationwide ban on a procedure that pro-life activists regard as infanticide.

The court ruled by five votes to four to allow to stand a law passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2003 which bans the type of termination of pregnancy which is known by anti-abortionists as "partial-birth abortion".

It is the first time the court has intervened in the way abortions are carried out, as opposed to just over abortion itself.

Both pro- and anti-abortionists viewed yesterday's decision as an important indication of a changing mood within the supreme court towards a more conservative position.

Over more than 30 years, since the seminal Roe v Wade case in 1973 established abortion as a right under the constitution, the court has tended to reject any attempt to restrict access to terminations.

In 2000 the supreme court heard a similar case about partial-birth abortions. It ruled by the same margin of five to four, but with the opposite view - that a ban on the procedure would unduly restrict a woman's rights.

What appears to have been crucial in tipping the court's attitude was the retirement last year of Sandra Day O'Connor from the nine-member panel, and her replacement, at George Bush's instigation, by the more conservative Samuel Alito. Pro-abortionists fear, and anti-abortionists hope, that yesterday's ruling will be just the start.

The procedure that was challenged involves doctors partially removing the foetus from a woman's uterus and then crushing or cutting into its skull while it is still in the woman's body.

Before yesterday's hearing six federal courts had ruled that to ban the practice would breach the right to an abortion enshrined in the case Roe v Wade.

But the majority opinion of the supreme court, handed down by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the ruling with Justices Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Antonin Scalia, and the chief justice, John Roberts, was that the right was not infringed as other, more acceptable, procedures were available to women.

However, a strongly worded minority opinion was given by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the court, who called the decision alarming. It "tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists." She added that the court's defence of the ban "cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this court, and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women's lives".

The group Planned Parenthood, which provides abortion services, said the ruling "flies in the face of 30 years of supreme court precedent and the best interest of women's health and safety".

But Joseph Scheidler, director of the Pro-Life Action League, which has pressed cases three times at the court in the past, said it indicated that a full overturning of Roe v Wade was inevitable. "We know that eventually it has to go, but in our view the sooner the better," he said.

Partial-birth abortions are only allowed for medical reasons and are applied to terminations after 12 weeks.