Court allows 24-hour wait on abortions

JEFFERSON CITY – Planned Parenthood suffered a blow May 27 in its ongoing crusade to protect abortion in Missouri when the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dissolved a temporary restraining order that had been blocking the state’s 24-hour wait law for women seeking abortions.

Allen Palmeri
Staff Writer

June 8, 2004

Planned Parenthood attorneys found an ally in U.S. District Court Judge Scott O. Wright of Kansas City, who since 1999 has been tying up Missouri ’s law banning partial birth abortion. He did the same thing for nearly eight months with the 24-hour wait law by issuing a restraining order Oct. 10, a day before it was to go into law. But Wright’s action was halted by the three-judge panel out of St. Louis.

The new law requires Missouri physicians to wait 24 hours to perform abortions after talking with women about various risk factors. Missouri thus becomes the 19th state with a 24-hour wait law, according to Americans United for Life.

“It’s completely constitutional,” said Kerry Messer, lobbyist for the Missouri Baptist Convention’s Christian Life Commission.

Missouri’s 24-hour wait law will remain in force even as Planned Parenthood attempts to find another judge like Wright, who was appointed by President Carter in 1979, to issue another temporary restraining order against it, Messer said. That may or may not happen. Messer is encouraged that the law is in force now.

“There are still appeals, and the outcome of those cases will result in appeals to the next level,” Messer said. “This will go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and I believe they will remand it. I don’t believe that they will waste their time with it.

“If we would only spend as much time on our knees in prayer as these guys spend trying to find ways to get around God’s law, then maybe we wouldn’t be in such bad shape.”

The loss of its battle to tie up the 24-hour wait bill was tempered somewhat by Planned Parenthood’s ongoing control of the law banning partial-birth abortion, which still languishes in Wright’s courtroom. Messer said pro-life Missourians have no real recourse in this five-year ordeal other than to pray.

“I would predict it’s going to continue sitting there until the citizens of the state get fed up with judges like Judge Wright and start turning these kinds of judges out,” Messer said.

Judge Wright is not alone in his apparent sympathy toward Planned Parenthood on the issue of partial-birth abortion. On June 1, U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton of San Francisco ruled that the partial-birth abortion ban signed into law by President Bush in November was unconstitutional. In the inhumane procedure, the living fetus is partially removed from the womb and its skull is punctured or crushed.

“This judge (Hamilton) has jeopardized the life of innocent babies who are now faced with a death of the most gruesome proportions,” said Rodney Albert, chairman, MBC Christian Life Commission, and pastor, Hallsville Baptist Church. “She has also overturned the will of the American people. Congress overwhelmingly passed this legislation.

“Our republic is gradually being turned into an oligarchy of federal magistrates. This judge audaciously stands against the will of the American people and the clear interpretation of our Constitution by insisting there is a constitutional right to maim, dismember and torture children in their last stage of pre-birth development.”

State Rep. Ed Emery, R-Lamar and a member of First Baptist Church, Lamar, led an effort in the 2004 General Assembly calling for the impeachment of Wright over his handling of abortion cases. A total of 34 legislators signed a resolution for impeachment that was introduced in the House of Representatives but did not get out of committee.

Emery said that judges like Wright have been taught that they are an imperial judiciary. When citizens and the legislators who represent them take back the governmental ground that is supposed to belong to the people, judges like Wright return to their proper place, Emery said.

Emery said he was “pretty amazed” by Wright’s action May 27 in which he ruled that a baby in the womb of a pregnant Raymore woman was an American citizen, thereby concluding that an unborn child is a human being. Wright cited the Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004, named for Laci Peterson and her unborn son, as the rationale for his decision.

Might Wright be a pro-life judge? “It does bring one thing clearly into focus,” Emery said. “It really is impossible for us to get into their minds and really know everything they are thinking.”

Does Emery now regret having ever triggered the movement among his House colleagues to impeach Wright?

“Absolutely not,” Emery said. “Those offenses (legislating from the bench) remain. Our impeachment attempts are based on history. They are not based on projection. We weren’t trying to impeach him for what he might do. We were trying to impeach him for what he has done.”

Emery said he would now want to hear Judge Wright’s explanation of his May 27 ruling in terms of its relationship to his previous decisions in abortion cases. The bulk of his rulings before May 27 tilted toward the Planned Parenthood position that a mother’s right to privacy is greater than anything the law might attribute to an unborn child which does not have rights because it is not a human being. Under that type of case law, a mother may terminate her child; under Constitutional law, however, a child is a human being with a right to life and is not to be terminated in the womb.

Not only did Wright block Missouri’s 1999 partial-birth abortion law, he also sided with pro-abortion-rights groups in previous cases involving bans on the use of public funds, employees or buildings for abortions and a prohibition on insurance policies from covering abortion services without extra co-payments, the Springfield News-Leader reported.