Understanding the PBA decision

A student of mine at Notre Dame Law School has posted an interesting paper, here, on the Supreme Court's decision upholding the federal ban on partial-birth abortion.  Here's a bit:

Gonzales v. Carhart represents a seismic shift in our nation's abortion jurisprudence. Upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, despite the lack of a health exception, it signals the end of what can be termed the physician veto. This veto can be globally defined as the placing of dispositive weight in our nation's abortion jurisprudence on the autonomy and judgment of physicians who favor abortion rights, at the expense of undergoing the more difficult and deeper process of engaging issues of women's liberty and equality vis-à-vis the nature of the unborn fetus and of abortion itself. From Roe until the more recent Carhart decision, this dispositive weight - the veto - has shielded the right to abortion in a manner that approaches the absolute through the erection of an impenetrable wall of deference to physician autonomy and judgment in this area of their practice.

This Note chronicles the life and death of the physician veto as it has been used to shield the right to abortion ever since Roe. This Note is not meant to be a critique or support of Carhart in terms of the substantive abortion issue at question. Neither is it intended to be an in-depth analysis of the intricacies of the Court's holdings in its abortion cases, as this has been exhaustively achieved elsewhere. Rather, it is an attempt to understand the precedential value of how Carhart will affect future abortion jurisprudence. In doing so, it exposes for future academic and legal discussion the plain fact that Carhart invites society to engage the abortion debate in a new way. Our jurisprudence is now invited to consider the abortion right - with its attendant philosophical and medical questions concerning women's liberty, equality and health, and the fetus' life and nature - without abbreviating the discussion through unqualified deference to the judgment of a physician who supports abortion rights.