The U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision upholding the right of the federal government to impose a ban on a certain form of rarely performed second-trimester abortion is unfortunate in two major ways.

First, it extends the role of the federal government into areas best left to physicians. The court upheld the idea that there be no medical exception in which a woman’s physician, after determining that so-called partial-birth abortion ( “intact dilation and evacuation”) was necessary to protect the health of the woman, could then perform the procedure.

The federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 did not provide such a “health exception.” Since then, three federal appeals courts have ruled against the government, asserting that the act was unconstitutional because it lacked such an exception. Now, of course, that’s gone: Doctors are henceforth prohibited from performing the procedure in consultation with patients after determining the degree of risk. The long arm of Washington will hover in the examining room.

The list of possible medical risks to women who have had “partial-birth abortions” include severe blood loss, damage to internal organs and loss of fertility. Court briefs calling for the overturn of the 2003 law have asserted that women with cancer and heart disease are among those who would have most need for the procedure.

Furrther, whatever you think of this procedure, that the federal government in this case has again intruded into an area that seems to us to be most properly situated close to or in domestic law — and therefore in our federal system under state jurisdiction — should trouble even many conservatives. This is part of a troubling pattern we have seen in the Bush administration of undermining the right of the states to regulate medicine within their boundaries. The Terry Schiavo case and the Oregon assisted-suicide law provide the best known cases of such, to us, inappropriate intervention.

In short, the ruling appears to be a dangerous over-reaching of federal jurisdiction, and one that we especially fear may set an unfortunate precedent for further inroads into individual rights and the relationship between physician and patient, up to and including an outright federal ban on abortion, thus overturning 1973’s Roe v. Wade protection of that right.