Rosen reviews Forsythe on Roe

Here is Jeff Rosen's helpful and I think fair review of Clarke Forsythe's new book -- "Abuse of Discretion" -- on the Roe decision.  Here's a bit:

. . . "Abuse of Discretion" provides a cautionary tale about the political and constitutional hazards of unnecessarily broad Supreme Court decisions. . . .

Justice Ginsburg has said that the court should have ruled more narrowly in Roe, striking down
the extreme Texas law while leaving it up to the states to debate the precise
contours of the right to choose. Mr. Forsythe agrees that a narrower ruling
could have allowed the debate to continue while participants observed how public
health was affected in the 13 states that allowed abortion under certain
circumstances. A wiser and more restrained approach, in other words, might have
been "wait and see."

Mr. Forsythe is especially critical of the Supreme Court for deciding Roe on an incomplete
factual record, with no trials or evidence in the lower courts or examination of
medical evidence. "Courts should not formulate rules of constitutional law
broader than required by the facts," Mr. Forsythe concludes. Today liberals
criticize conservative justices for delivering overly broad decisions in cases
like Citizens Unitedv. Federal Election Commission, which struck down
campaign-finance restrictions on corporate spending, and Shelby County v.
Holder, which struck down a key provision of the Federal Voting Rights Act. Mr.
Forsythe's book is a useful chronicle of the most prominent case in the past 40
years when the shoe was on the other foot.

Again, I think the review is well done, and I'm very happy for Mr. Forsythe, who has been working hard on this important project.  I do have one minor quibble / question regarding the review, though.  Rosen writes:

The most surprising omission in this book is that Mr. Forsythe fails to discuss in any
detail the transformative impact of Gonzales v. Carhart, the 2007 decision by
the Supreme Court upholding the federal partial-birth abortion law, which
doesn't contain a health exception and allows restrictions on abortion both
before and after fetal viability. The Gonzales case, which Americans United for
Life has invoked in defending current laws that restrict abortions throughout
pregnancy, calls into question Mr. Forsythe's claim that the U.S. today is one
of only four nations allowing abortion "for any reason after fetal
viability."

But, the partial-birth-abortion law (if I remember correctly) restricts post-viability abortions of a certain type, not abortion itself.  So, it doesn't seem to me that the Court's decision undermines Clarke's claim about America's outlier status in terms of allowing abortions after viability.  Still, as Rosen writes, the longer-term effects of the decision remain to be seen.