In responding to Joseph Ramgli's column "Court's abortion ruling shows conservative shift" (April 25), I first want to clarify the terminology. In the medical community, the procedure is called intact dilation and extraction (intact D&X). Conservatives call it partial-birth abortion, and liberals call it late-term abortion. As for the recent Supreme Court ruling in Gonzales v. Carhart (2007) that upheld the constitutionality of the intact D&X ban, I think we have seen a tremendous miscarriage of justice. Not because I agree with abortion in a woman's second trimester of pregnancy, but because the partial-birth abortion ban, passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2003, limited the options available to physicians to safeguard a woman's health.

While the ban does include a life exception, it does not have a health exemption. In 1997, the United States Seventh Circuit of Appeals invalidated an Ohio ban on intact D&X because it lacked a health exemption. A majority of the medical community acknowledges that the intact D&X procedure is rarely used, and, in most of those cases, it is used to safeguard a woman's health. While I find the procedure distasteful, I also think that Congress and the courts must not tie the hands of physicians whose medical expertise make them the final arbiter on a woman's treatment. Women should not have to live with infertility or some other serious medical condition just because Congress and the conservative wing of the Supreme Court want to replace the American Medical Association.