Supreme Court allows inmate abortion

Despite what many Republicans think, Evangelical Christians, the "social conservatives" who voted en masse for Bush, really care about only one thing. They make a lot of noise about homosexuality and they are perfectly happy to jump on board the GOP tax and terrorism agenda, but at the end of the day all they want is to see abortion outlawed. Tens of millions of Evangelicals are, literally, one-issue voters. Their monolithic support for the GOP is based almost entirely on the assurance that the party's number-one priority is overturing Roe v. Wade. They accepted whole-heartedly Bush's implied promise to do so through the use of judicial appointments.

Christian conservatives, therefore, will not receive this as welcome news.

Issuing its first abortion-related decision under new Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the Supreme Court refused yesterday to block the court-ordered transport of a female prison inmate to an outside clinic for an abortion.

The court's two-sentence order capped five tense days of litigation. The woman, now 16 weeks pregnant, was battling a new Missouri policy forbidding prisons to assist women seeking to terminate their pregnancies, as corrections officials had done in seven previous cases during the last eight years.

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The order came unaccompanied by a published opinion or recorded dissent, so there is no way to tell how many justices might have voted against the order -- if any. Nor is there any way to know why Thomas agreed to a temporary stay after two lower courts had denied one, or what legal arguments ultimately prevailed among the justices.

Still, the order does suggest that, under Roberts, a majority of the court was not inclined to rush into a new abortion battle, even when implored to do so by a state where the anti-abortion movement is particularly strong. The order put renewed attention on the court and abortion cases just as the Senate plans confirmation hearings on White House counsel Harriet Miers, who President Bush has nominated to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. She has been the swing vote on key abortion decisions in recent years, and Democratic senators have said they will question Miers on her views of abortion.

So, the first test finds the Roberts court affirming by silent consent a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy. This will place even greater pressure on the president to reassure Evangelicals that Harriet Miers would take the bench determined to overturn Roe regardless of the specifics of any case that might bring the matter before the court. Any such reassurance, however, will cause Democratic and many Republican senators to reject Miers as a thoughtless ideologue.

This has implications for 2006 and 2008 as Evangelicals begin to wonder how long they are willing to bestow their support in return for such an anemic payoff.