Ginsburg Battles Colon Cancer
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is recovering from her surgery for colon cancer without complications, reports CBS News Correspondent Stephanie Lambidakis.
The 66-year-old justice underwent surgery Friday at Washington Hospital Center; the court's press office said she will remain hospitalized through the end of the week.
There's still no word on how advanced her cancer is or on whether she'll able to return to work when the next Supreme Court session gets under way Oct. 4.
Colon cancer is one of the most common cancers in the United States and the second-leading cancer killer, behind lung cancer. The American Cancer Society estimates that 131,000 Americans will be diagnosed this year with colorectal cancer of the large intestine or the rectum. About 56,000 will die.
The most common treatment is surgical removal of the cancerous part of the colon and any nearby lymph nodes where the cancer has spread. Post-surgical radiation is often prescribed to kill any leftover tumor cells and decrease the chances of a recurrence.
Ginsburg felt ill while teaching in Crete this summer as part of a program run by Tulane University's law school. While there, she was diagnosed as suffering from acute diverticulitis, an intestinal inflammation.
It was not until Ginsburg sought treatment at the Washington Hospital Center that the cancer diagnosis was made.
When President Clinton appointed Ginsburg to the nation's highest court in 1993 he said, "Ruth Bader Ginsburg does not need a seat on the Supreme Court to earn her place in the American history books. She has already done that."
As a pioneering advocate for women's rights, Ginsburg argued six key cases before the Supreme Court in the 1970s. She won five of them. She was an appeals court judge for 13 years before her elevation to the Supreme Court.
Ginsburg, who ideologically is somewhere left of center, votes most often with Stephen G. Breyer and two Republican appointees, John Paul Stevens and David H. Souter. In the most divisive of cases, she often is at odds with the court's more conservative members Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.
Although a facile writer, Ginsburg has authored few majority opinions in the court's most controversial decisions.
One exception was the 1996 ruling that ordered the Virginia Military Institute to admit women or give up its state funding.
Ginsburg wrote for the court, as it ruled 7-1, that the school's male-only admissions policy violated women's equal protection rights.
Twenty-six years earlier, Ginsburg had worked on the legal team that persuaded the high court to rule for the first time that a state had violated the Constitution by denying women equal treatment.