An opinion Obama wholeheartedly agrees with.
(CNSNews.com) — President Barack Obama on Tuesday awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom — which he described as “the highest civilian honor this country can bestow” — on retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote a Supreme Court opinion arguing that a woman was exercising her right to “liberty” when she hired a doctor to kill her child through the procedure known as partial-birth abortion.
“That holding — that the word ‘liberty’ in the Fourteenth Amendment includes a woman’s right to make this difficult and extremely personal decision — makes it impossible for me to understand how a State has any legitimate interest in requiring a doctor to follow any procedure other than the one that he or she reasonably believes will best protect the woman in her exercise of this constitutional liberty,” Justice Stevens wrote in his concurring opinion in Stenberg v. Carhart.
During his time on the court, Stevens joined in two Supreme Court opinions specifically arguing that partial-birth abortion was a constitutional right. The first was the majority opinion in Stenberg, the second was the minority opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart. […]
In concurring in Breyer’s opinion, future Medal of Freedom winner Stevens said that preserving the right to dismember what he called a “potential life” partially removed from his or her mother’s womb was really a question about the “liberty” protected by the 14th Amendment as recognized in the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade.
“Although much ink is spilled today describing the gruesome nature of late-term abortion procedures, that rhetoric does not provide me a reason to believe that the procedure Nebraska here claims it seeks to ban is more brutal, more gruesome, or less respectful of ‘potential life’ than the equally gruesome procedure Nebraska claims it still allows,” said Stevens.