Excerpts from Wednesday’s arguments before the Supreme Court on whether the justices should uphold a congressional ban on a disputed abortion procedure:

Solicitor General Paul Clement: Congress held six hearings over four different Congresses and heard from dozens of witnesses in determining that partial-birth abortions are never medically necessary, pose health risks, and should be banned. Under familiar principles of deference to congressional fact-finding, those determinations should be upheld as long as they represent reasonable inferences based on substantial evidence in the congressional record.

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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Couldn’t Congress make similar findings with respect to what is the most common method for second trimester abortions?

Clement: There is quite a different situation when Congress comes in and tries to deal with the primary abortion method in the second trimester. Here, though, Congress didn’t go after the dog, so to speak, it went after the tail.

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Priscilla Smith, Center for Reproductive Rights: The only course here that preserves independence of the judiciary, that exemplifies the importance of stare decisis, not to mention the only course that will protect women from needless risks of uterine perforation, infertility, sepsis and hemorrhage, is to hold this act unconstitutional.

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Eve Gartner, Planned Parenthood Federation of America: This court must reject Congress’s effort to exploit the limited license that this court seemingly granted in Stenberg. … What Congress has done here is take away from women the option of what may be the safest procedure for her.

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Chief Justice John Roberts: Do you agree with the discussion earlier that this act is not going to prevent abortions?

Smith: No, not at all, Your Honor. … I think the evidence clearly shows that this is a very broad law.

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Roberts: Do you understand the scope of this statute to be different than the scope of the statute at issue in Stenberg, focusing in particular on the deliberate and intentional language?

Clement: I certainly do, Mr. Chief Justice, and I think that this statute, unlike the Nebraska statute, clearly uses an anatomical landmark approach that is based in the text of the statute.

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Justice Anthony Kennedy: In how many of those instances is there serious health risk to the mother that requires the procedure as opposed to simply being an elective procedure? Are there any statistics on that?

Smith: No. In terms of the underlying medical conditions there really aren’t, Your Honor, and it varies dramatically according to the practice of the physician. If a physician is in a high-risk … practice, he or she is much more likely to encounter patients with serious underlying medical conditions such as the ones that the doctors have testified about in this case.

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Justice Stephen Breyer: The court came to the conclusion that the statute of Nebraska was unconstitutional because it lacked an exception for the health of the mother, something that came from preceding cases. So if giving deference to Nebraska, we reach that conclusion there, and if the deference that is owed is the same, and if the evidence is about the same on both sides, how can we reach a different conclusion here?

Clement: Well, Justice Breyer, I mean, obviously I’m at a certain deficit to you in discussing what this court held in the Stenberg opinion, which you wrote. But my reading of that opinion is that this court did not focus on what was before the Nebraska legislature. But this court focused on what the district court found.

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Justice John Paul Stevens: General Clement, are not some of the findings by Congress clearly erroneous? For example, there is a statement that no current medical schools provide instruction in the procedure. Now that’s clearly wrong, isn’t it? … Supposing there was a lot of evidence introduced in the district court that there were schools like Yale and New York University that did include this as part of a curriculum, could the district court disregard that finding and make a contrary finding?

Clement: I think if the evidence in the district court were overwhelmingly to the contrary, I think that the district court could effectively undermine that one finding.

Stevens: On other findings, is there a different standard of review of what the district court found as opposed to what Congress found?

Clement: If the district court was addressing something, an issue that just wasn’t before Congress at all, but it’s somehow relevant, and makes factual findings, I suppose the district court is entitled to the normal kind of deference on review.