LeRoy Carhart

LeRoy Harrison Carhart (b. 1941) is a physician from Nebraska, USA, who became well-known for his participation in the Supreme Court cases Stenberg v. Carhart and Gonzales v. Carhart, both of which dealt with Intact dilation and extraction.

Biography
Carhart is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and one of only three abortion providers in the state of Nebraska. He is a graduate of Rutgers University and a 1973 graduate of Hahnemann University School of Medicine (now Drexel University College of Medicine).

On 6 September, 1991, arsonists targeted Carhart's farm, setting fire to his home and a forty-eight stall barn, along with two other buildings and numerous vehicles. The attack killed two family pets and 17 horses. Despite investigations by both local and state authorities, no arrests were made and no one has been connected to the attack.

Court cases
Carhart filed suit against the Nebraska Attorney General, Don Stenberg, because a Nebraska law banned a form of abortion, dilation and extraction (D&X), which involves partially removing a fetus from the uterus before terminating it and which critics refer to as "partial-birth abortion." In Stenberg v. Carhart the United States Supreme Court struck down the Nebraska law with Sandra Day O'Connor providing the swing vote for the five-to-four decision because the law did not allow for the use of the procedure even when the mother's health would be put at greater risk by another abortion procedure.

Carhart later filed suit against U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales seeking to strike down the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, a federal law that is similar to the state law struck down in Stenberg, but while the Court did not officially reverse Stenberg, it upheld the federal ban as not imposing an undue burden on women, the test established in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. O'Connor's successor, Samuel Alito, sided with the four Justices who dissented in Stenberg, creating a five-to-four majority. In the Gonzales v. Carhart case, his attorney was Priscilla J. Smith.