Court Ruling Did Not End Ambivalence on Abortion

By deciding that women had the constitutional right to make their own decisions about early abortion, the U.S. Supreme Court was bringing America back to a time before there was even a Constitution.

Abortion was legal and widely practiced in colonial America and the early years of the republic. In the early and mid-1800s, it was seen as a perfectly acceptable birth control method, and by the 1860s, it was estimated that there was an abortion for every four live births.

What changed the laws was not a conservative religious movement, but the fledgling American Medical Assn., which lobbied to give physicians, not pregnant women, the power to decide when abortions were medically indicated. State abortion laws thus became bound up with the medical regulations that were being drawn at the time. Those regulations gave rise to the back alley abortionists whose unregulated and frequently unsafe practices would threaten women’s lives.

It took the National Organization for Women, which had made abortion rights one of the two main parts of its platform, and a Texas test case involving a pregnant carnival worker to bring the matter up for reconsideration.

The all-male U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1973 that the Constitution’s implied right to privacy extended to a woman’s right to decide about abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy, when a fetus could not be considered viable outside the womb. In the second trimester, the state is allowed to regulate abortions to protect the health of the mother; abortions can be forbidden in the third trimester, except in cases in which the mother’s life is at risk.

The day after the court decision, the death of former President Lyndon B. Johnson got more play. But the justices delivered the more far-reaching news. Their decision would create more deep cracks in a society still struggling with the polarization of the Vietnam War and the sea change in civil rights.

The feminist movement would celebrate abortion rights as a major victory in an overall movement to achieve equal rights for women.

But the decision sparked shock waves of grief and moral outrage among those who believe that life begins at conception and that abortion constitutes the murder of an innocent child.

Many in the nation see the issue in more complex terms. The decision about whether to have an abortion has proved to be a difficult one for many women, including abortion rights advocates.

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All but lost in the political uproar was carnival worker Norma McCorvey, whose name was not widely known for years. She became the test case’s “Jane Roe” in Roe vs. Wade. (Wade was Dallas district attorney Henry Wade, who was trying to enforce Texas antiabortion laws.)

McCorvey falsely claimed to have become pregnant through rape but was still unable to get the abortion she had sought in court. She wound up carrying the baby to term and giving her up for adoption before the U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

McCorvey, whose autobiography was published in 1994, has long struggled with her role in one of the country’s most contentious issues. Neither feminists nor abortion rights activists would fully embrace her as an ally.

She became more of a poster model for the country’s ambivalence about abortion in 1995, when Operation Rescue moved its national headquarters to a Dallas office complex--next to the abortion clinic where McCorvey worked. McCorvey, a lesbian who was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, was first befriended and later baptized by Operation Rescue evangelist Flip Benham. She quit her job at the abortion clinic and said she wanted “to help women save their babies,” although she still believed in a woman’s right to first-trimester abortions, particularly in cases of fetal deformities.

In the 26 years since the Supreme Court ruling, the issue is as argued as it was in the early 1970s. Debates have raged over parental permission in the case of minors, over partial-birth abortion procedures, over legalization in this country of morning after pills.

And at times the debate has grown violent. Since 1982, at least seven abortion providers have been killed, and there have been 229 abortion clinic arson attacks or bombings across the nation. Last year, two abortion providers were killed and authorities logged at least one bombing and 19 acid attacks.

The Justice Department created the National Task Force on Violence Against Health Care Providers in November, less than a month after the two physicians were killed. U.S. marshals offer protection at 24-hour abortion clinics.

In announcing creation of the task force, U.S. Atty. Gen Janet Reno said: “These attacks and others seek to undermine a woman’s basic constitutional right, the right to reproductive health care.”