NY Times Editorial - Two Abortion Wars: State Battles Over Roe v. Wade 1-30-11

The Two Abortion Wars: State Battles Over Roe v. Wade
Published: January 29, 2011

Away from Washington, another ominous anti-abortion battle is accelerating in the states. Anti-abortion forces have been trying to take advantage of the 2007 ruling in which the Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on a particular method of abortion.

In 2010, more than 600 measures were introduced in state legislatures to limit access to abortion and some 34 secured passage, according to tallies by Naral Pro-Choice America and the Center for Reproductive Rights. November’s elections made the outlook even bleaker.

Twenty-nine governors are considered solidly anti-abortion, up from 21 before the election. In 15 states, both the legislature and the governor are anti-abortion, compared with 10 last year. This math greatly increases the prospect of extreme efforts to undermine abortion access with Big Brother measures that require physicians to read scripts about fetal development and provide ultrasound images, and that impose mandatory waiting periods or create other unnecessary regulations.

Such restrictions, combined with a persistent atmosphere of intimidation and violence, have taken a grievous toll on the fundamental right protected by Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that recognized a woman’s constitutional right to make her own child-bearing decisions. Eighty-seven percent of counties have no abortion provider, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

For the moment, most state legislatures are preoccupied with budget crises, so the next abortion battles are still taking shape. However, there are at least two areas where anti-abortion forces will be active in 2011.

The first is the fight over health insurance. The second is the expanding effort to ban later abortions.
Reigning Supreme Court precedent restricts the government’s ability to bar abortions prior to the point considered to be the earliest a fetus could survive outside the womb, around 22 to 26 weeks after conception.

Nebraska enacted a law last year directly challenging the viability standard. The statute, which went into effect in October, bans abortions 20 weeks after conception. It includes a very narrow exception for a woman’s life and physical health, and lacks any exception for the discovery of severe fetal anomalies. Copycat laws are now pending in other states.

About 90 percent of abortions take place in the first trimester, but that does not excuse some states’ efforts to require women to continue pregnancies after a tragic fetal diagnosis or pregnancies that result from rape or incest. The objective is to provide the Supreme Court’s conservative majority with a new vehicle for further tampering with Roe v. Wade’s insight that the decision about whether to terminate a pregnancy is best left to women and their doctors pre-viability.

Americans who support women’s reproductive rights and oppose this kind of outrageous government intrusion need to respond with rising force and clarity to this real and immediate danger.

A version of this editorial appeared in print on January 30, 2011, on page WK7 of the New York edition.