Ryan's gambit failed. But in 2003, President Bush signed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act into law. And by 2007, the United States Supreme Court adopted Ryan's attack on "abortionists" and the health and safety of American women.

In 2000, after Justice Stephen Breyer upheld the Court's previous exception "for the preservation of the [...] health of the mother," Justice Anthony Kennedy eradicated it in his baseless and paternalistic 2007 Gonzales v. Carhart opinion. Derisively referring to physicians as "abortion doctors" and with callous disregard for the health of American women, Kennedy decreed that father knows best in the 5-4 majority opinion. (His 2000 dissent in Stenberg v. Carhart used the incendiary term "abortionist" no fewer than 13 times.) As the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus recalled:



"Respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child," Kennedy intoned. This is one of those sentences about women's essential natures that are invariably followed by an explanation of why the right at stake needs to be limited. For the woman's own good, of course. Kennedy continues: "While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained." No reliable data? No problem!

Sadly for Justice Kennedy and sadder still for American women, the mythical post-abortion syndrome he posited has been repeatedly debunked, most recently by a study in Denmark.

In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg reminded Americans about what they had just lost—"The health exception reaches only those cases where a woman's health is at risk." As Roger Evans, then public policy director at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, put it:



"Where there is medical disagreement, the tie no longer goes to protecting women's health."

A bit of backstory: currently, all hospitals in America that receive Medicare or Medicaid funding are bound by a 1986 law known as EMTALA to provide emergency care to all comers, regardless of their ability to pay or other factors. Hospitals do not have to provide free care to everyone that arrives at their doorstep under EMTALA -- but they do have to stabilize them and provide them with emergency care without factoring in their ability to pay for it or not. If a hospital can't provide the care a patient needs, it is required to transfer that patient to a hospital that can, and the receiving hospital is required to accept that patient [...] Pitts' new bill would free hospitals from any abortion requirement under EMTALA, meaning that medical providers who aren't willing to terminate pregnancies wouldn't have to -- nor would they have to facilitate a transfer. The hospital could literally do nothing at all, pro-choice critics of Pitts' bill say.

By the time their new majority took over the House in January 2011, "protecting women's health" was no longer a factor at all for Republicans. In H.R. 358 (the "Protect Life Act"), sponsor Joe Pitts (R-PA) and co-sponsors Todd Akin and Paul Ryan had proposed legislation which TPM explained "would allow hospitals to let a pregnant woman die rather than perform the abortion that would save her life."As Donna Crane, policy director at NARAL Pro-Choice America, put it, "This is really out there. I haven't seen this before."

But she and all Americans can expect to see this again and again from Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and their Republican Party. After all, women's health is no consideration at all in the new Republican platform, which would extend 14th Amendment protections to fetuses it would withhold from the women themselves.