Preface

In the lead article, attorney and scholar Paul Benjamin Linton explores the legal status of abortion in the States if the Supreme Court overrules Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), and Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179 (1973), as modified by Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992). Although an overruling

decision eventually could have a significant effect on the legal status of abortion, the immediate impact of such a decision would be far more modest than most commentators believe. More than two-thirds of the States have repealed their pre-Roe laws or have amended those laws to conform to Roe v. Wade, which allows abortion for any reason before viability and for virtually any reason after viability. Of the slightly less than one-third of the States that have not repealed their pre-Roe laws, most would be ineffective in prohibiting abortions, either because the laws, by their express terms or as interpreted, allow abortion on demand for a broad range of reasons, including mental health or for undefined reasons of health, or because of state constitutional limitations. In yet other States, the pre-Roe laws prohibiting abortion may have been repealed by implication with the enactment of comprehensive post-Roe laws regulating abortion. In sum, no more than eleven States, and possibly as few as seven, would have enforceable laws on the books that would prohibit most abortions in the event Roe, Doe and Casey are overruled. In the other States and the District of Columbia, abortion would be legal for most or all reasons throughout pregnancy.

The second article, by economics professor David L. Kaserman, Ph.D., reviews the successes and failures of more than fifty years of organ transplantation. During that time, substantial progress has been made in both surgical techniques and immunosuppressive drug therapy. As a result, transplant success rates have improved dramatically, and thousands of recipients of kidneys, hearts, livers, and lungs have been granted both longer and healthier lives. At the same time, however, many more thousands of patients have died while waiting in vain for a cadaveric donor organ to become available due to a severe and persistent shortage of such organs. That shortage, in turn, is directly attributable to the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, which proscribes payment to potential organ donors, even if that would increase supply. But the tide of medical opinion may be turning on this issue and some form of donor payments may be emerging.

Professor Charles I. Lugosi, LL.M., M.B.E., S.J.D., in the third article, examines the meaning of the killing of four patients with disabilities on the Life Care ward of Tenets Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans in anticipation of hurricane Katrina. None were terminally ill. None were in pain. None knew their lives were about to end. None were evacuated. The victims had one thing in common: they all had chosen to be designated as Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) patients. All were killed with overdoses of medications that had not been prescribed for them. Dr. Daniel Nuss of the Louisiana State University School of Medicine and Dr. Floyd Burras, President of the Louisiana Medical Society defend the doctor's actions as involuntary euthanasia or mercy killing. Was this euthanasia or homicide? At Memorial, the term DNR took on a new meaning-Do Not Rescue. In this new Memorial model, patient autonomy to control and choose one's medical treatment yields to the physicians unilateral power to arbitrarily decide who lives and who dies. The author concludes that doctors and hospitals must observe the rule of law, even in times of natural disaster.

The Nota Bene section is a summary of the recent United States Supreme Court decision in Gonzales v. Carhart, which reiterated its precedent that the State has the power to restrict abortions after viability and has legitimate interests from the pregnancy's outset in protecting the health of the woman and the life of the fetus. The Court held that the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act is not void for vagueness and does not impose an undue burden on a woman's right to abortion based on overbreadth or lack of health exception.

The Abstracts section includes recent articles on compensated kidney donation in Iran, ethical limits on expanding living donor transplantation, general population readiness for living liver donation, euthanasia as uncontrollable power, the parallel development of "brain death" and organ transplantation, the importance of newborn screening, the European Council's Convention on Biomedicine and protection of embryonic life, the U.N. Declaration on Human Cloning, and the moral distinction between embryos produced by in vitro fertilization and those produced by somatic cell nuclear transfer.

The Novi Libri section announces new books on the myths of abortion, a bungled organ transplant, the history and ethics of assisted suicide and euthanasia, doctor/patient communication, and a state-by-state legal guide to abortion, bioethics, and end of life care.

This edition concludes our fifteenth year as a peer reviewed journal. In 2005-2006 we published seven original manuscripts and rejected seventeen manuscripts. Appearing at the close of this issue is our Peer Reviewer Acknowledgment of all those scholars who have assisted us in 2005-2006 with the review of manuscripts considered for publication.

AUTHOR_AFFILIATION

-James Bopp, Jr., J. D.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF