Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U.S. 124 (2007), is a United States Supreme Court case that upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. The case reached the high court after U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales appealed a ruling of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in favor of LeRoy Carhart that struck down the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Also before the Supreme Court was the consolidated appeal of Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which had struck down the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.

The Supreme Court's decision upheld Congress's ban and held that it did not impose an undue burden on the due process right of women to obtain an abortion, "under precedents we here assume to be controlling," such as the Court's prior decisions in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In a legal sense, the case distinguished but did not overrule Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), in which the Court dealt with related issues. However, Gonzales was widely interpreted as signaling a shift in Supreme Court jurisprudence toward a restriction of abortion rights, occasioned in part by the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor and her replacement by Samuel Alito. An editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine identified the case as a landmark: "This is the first time the Court has ever held that physicians can be prohibited from using a medical procedure deemed necessary by the physician to benefit the patient's health."

LeRoy Harrison Carhart (born 1941) is an American physician from Nebraska 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 (colloquially known as partial birth abortion), a controversial abortion procedure.

Carhart is a retired U.S. Air Force officer. He is a graduate of Rutgers University and a 1973 graduate of Hahnemann University School of Medicine (now Drexel University College of Medicine).

On September 6, 1991, the day of the passage of the Nebraska Parental Notification Law, arsonists allegedly targeted Carhart's farm, setting fire to his home and a 48-stall barn, along with two other buildings and numerous vehicles. The attack killed two family pets and 17 horses. The fire, which had started in seven different locations on Carhart's property, was never deemed arson and no one was prosecuted. Carhart stated that he received a note the morning after the fire claiming responsibility and likening the deaths of his animals to the "murder of children". At the time of the fire, abortions had been a small part of Carhart's surgical practice; afterwards, determined not to "cede a victory to the antis", Carhart began performing abortions full-time.

Barack Hussein Obama II (ⁱ/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. In January 2005, Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in the state of Illinois. He would hold this office until November 2008, when he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012.

Alan Lee Keyes (born August 7, 1950) is an American conservative political activist, author, former diplomat, and perennial candidate for public office. A doctoral graduate of Harvard University, Keyes began his diplomatic career in the U.S. Foreign Service in 1979 at the United States consulate in Bombay, India, and later in the American embassy in Zimbabwe.

He ran for President of the United States in 1996, 2000, and 2008, and was a Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in 1988, 1992, and 2004. Keyes was appointed Ambassador to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations by President Ronald Reagan, and served as Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs from 1985 to 1987; in his capacities as a UN ambassador, among Keyes's accomplishments was contributing to the Mexico City Policy.

Keyes also hosted a radio talk show, The Alan Keyes Show: America's Wake-Up Call, and a television commentary show on the MSNBC cable network, Alan Keyes Is Making Sense.