Local Planned Parenthood San Diego leaders spoke at The Center’s Community Coalition Breakfast last week to denounce the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the federal abortion ban in the cases Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood and Gonzales v. Carhart, a decision that restricts women from terminating pregnancies after the first trimester.

“The decision represents a seismic shift in the attitudes of the Supreme Court. They’ve taken a very personal decision between a woman and her physician and they’ve given it to the legislatures and legislators,” said Darrah Johnson, president of Planned Parenthood of San Diego and Riverside Counties, adding that the justices turned their backs on more than 30 years of Supreme Court decisions protecting women’s health from dangerous laws restricting abortion.

The decision upholds the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act passed by Congress and signed by Bush in 2003 to criminalize abortions. Last week’s decision, led by Bush appointees Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito to a 5-4 majority, represents a major victory for the Bush administration. It’s the court’s first decision on an abortion case since Bush named Roberts and Alito to the court.

The majority decision, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, says that the Act does not violate a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. However, both abortion rights advocates and pro-life advocates say it sets the stage for further restrictions on abortions. Both national and local abortion rights advocates are rallying to prevent what they see as further erosions of women’s constitutional right to abortion. At The Center, Johnson and Hall also discussed The Freedom of Choice Act, introduced in the House and Senate on Thursday by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-C.A, in response to the Supreme Court’s decision. They urged community members to call their elected officials and urge them to support legislation that would codify Roe v. Wade – the 1973 federal case that originally granted women the constitutional right to abortion – and thereby bar states from limiting abortion rights.

GLBT rights are also affected by the decision, said Planned Parenthood communication director Vince Hall. “Sodomy laws and the right to privacy are based on the same fundamental rights and the same court cases as the right to choose,” he said.

“[Coalition] is more necessary now than ever legally, because if the fundamental legal pillars are undermined then the entirety to the right to privacy, which has secured new freedoms for our gay and lesbian citizens, is also undermined,” Hall added. “The two communities have to be conscious that we are united not just in our progressive enlightenment, but also in our legal struggles for security.”

The Supreme Court ruling will have a direct impact on a relatively small number of procedures, but has broader implications for abortion regulations generally, indicating a change in the court’s balancing of the various interests involved in the abortion debate.

The procedure at issue, known medically as “intact dilation and extraction,” involves partially removing the fetus intact from a woman’s uterus, then “crushing” or “cutting” its skull.

Abortion opponents say the law will not reduce the number of abortions performed because an alternative method – dismembering the fetus in the uterus – is still legal and, indeed, much more common.

Both methods are used to terminate pregnancies beginning at about 12 weeks, after the fetus has grown too big to be removed by the suction method commonly used in the first trimester, when about 90 percent of abortions take place.