Ever since the Supreme Court handed down the Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973, the controversial issue of abortion has been debated, centering around the question of whether the government has the right to tell a women what she can do her body.

Eve Gartner, a senior staff attorney in the Public Policy Litigation & Law Department of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, lectured about the Supreme Court battles with reproductive rights and partial-birth abortion laws in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union on Sunday night.

Gartner said the Supreme Court created the partial-birth abortion law to address a non-existent problem. She said the law infringes on the right to safe abortions.

Gartner said the partial-birth abortion law accurately describes the procedure that is banned.

“The image that this language creates is the image that the abortion is being done in a time and pregnancy that the fetus could survive if, in fact, the woman continued the pregnancy and that only because the doctor intervenes is the fetus allowed to die. This is very far from the truth,” Gartner said.

The procedure, called intact dilation and extraction, is usually performed between weeks 14 and 24 of the pregnancy, when the fetus would be unable to live outside the womb.

“Virtually every state in this country already has a law or statute in the books that bans all abortions after fetal viability,” Gartner said. “So the proponents of this statute essentially put out there the idea of a problem that was really a completely non-existent problem.”

Gartner said the Supreme Court should not be in the business of defining morality for the country, and that the rationale for the partial birth law was not entirely solid. The reasoning basis of moral and ethical feelings of some of the justices and for the potential for regret on the woman’s part.

“The court said it was upholding this ban on intact D and E abortions because it needed to protect women from the possibility of having an intact D and E abortion and later regret it,” Gartner said. “To protect women from potentially regretting their decision, the court will simply take that decision away from women altogether.”

The court did not regard the medical evidence about the safety of the procedure, Gartner said, and came up with an idea that was fabricated, biased and put politics over science.

Gartner warned that the Supreme Court could be one justice away from overturning Roe vs. Wade, and stressing that elections do matter in determining which way the Supreme Court will go.

Attendees of the lecture are still going to have to make their own decisions on the issue of abortion in all its forms.

“I think women, equal with men, can be trusted to make good decisions for themselves,” said Pauline Miller, staff physician of the Thielen Student Health Center. “I think we can trust women to make their own choices, whether it’s to be pro-life or pro-choice. I don’t think the courts should be involved in that, I think they should not restrict choice.”