LeRoy Carhart

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LeRoy Harrison Carhart (b. 1941) is a American physician from Nebraska who became well-known for his participation in the Supreme Court cases Stenberg v. Carhart and Gonzales v. Carhart, both of which dealt with intact dilation and extraction (colloquially known as "partial birth abortion"), a controversial abortion procedure.

1 Biography
2 Court cases
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Biography

Carhart is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and one of only three abortion providers in the state of Nebraska.^[1]^[2] He is a graduate of Rutgers University^{[citation needed]} and a 1973 graduate of Hahnemann University School of Medicine (now Drexel University College of Medicine).^[3]

On 6 September 1991, the day of the passage of the Nebraska Parental Notification Law, arsonists targeted Carhart's farm, setting fire to his home and a 48-stall barn, along with two other buildings and numerous vehicles. The attack killed two family pets and 17 horses. The fire, which had started in seven different locations on Carhart's property, was never deemed arson and no one was prosecuted. Carhart received a note the morning after the fire claiming responsibility and likening the deaths of his animals to the "murder of children". At the time of the fire, abortions had been a small part of Carhart's surgical practice; afterwards, determined not "cede a victory to the antis", Carhart began performing abortions full-time.^[1]^[4]

[edit] Court cases

Carhart filed suit against the Nebraska Attorney General, Don Stenberg, because a Nebraska law banned a form of abortion, dilation and extraction (D&E), which involves partially removing a fetus from the uterus before terminating it and which critics refer to as "partial-birth abortion." In Stenberg v. Carhart the United States Supreme Court struck down the Nebraska law with Sandra Day O'Connor providing the swing vote for the five-to-four decision because the law did not allow for the use of the procedure even when the mother's health would be put at greater risk by another abortion procedure.

Carhart later filed suit against U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales seeking to strike down the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, a federal law that is similar to the state law struck down in Stenberg, but while the Court did not officially reverse Stenberg, it upheld the federal ban as not imposing an undue burden on women, the test established in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.^[5] O'Connor's successor, Samuel Alito, sided with the four Justices who dissented in Stenberg, creating a five-to-four majority. In the Gonzales v. Carhart case, his attorney was Priscilla J. Smith.