Abortion rights on life support
Almost 45 years after Roe v Wade, the future looks very shaky.
Memorial services were held this week for Norma McCorvey. The name doesn’t mean much to most people, but McCorvey was Jane Roe – the namesake, anonymous plaintiff in Roe v Wade, the US Supreme Court case that recognised a woman’s right to an abortion as an exercise of her constitutionally protected right to privacy.
McCorvey had a turbulent early life. A runaway, drug abuser and child bride, the pregnancy she sought to abort (but could not because of Texas’s draconian laws) was her third. She was the perfect plaintiff – a victim of poverty, chaotic parenting and her own bad choices. By the time of her ‘‘victory’’ in the Supreme Court, the daughter she had sought to abort was 21⁄2 years old, living with adoptive parents.
It is a point of confusion to many observers of the US: why the debate over abortion is so central to American politics. Just like gun control, it defines the political parties, a chasm which neither side can cross. Since Ronald Reagan, it has been an issue that presidents have chosen a side on.
The maelstrom over abortion boils down to religion and the extent to which US law ought to embody and advance Christian values. The debate centres on whether laws should punish a deeply personal decision on the basis that part of the population deems the procedure a religious or moral wrong. And ultimately, whether the procedure is, at its core, the ending of the life of an innocent, or the exercise of selfdetermination (and in some circumstances, selfpreservation) by the mother.
As soon as Roe was decided in 1973, Republicans and the selfstyled ‘‘pro-life’’ movement started making plans to overturn it. They won a quick victory with the Hyde Amendment, a rider attached annually to Medicaid spending that prohibits the use of federal money for abortions, except in very limited circumstances. This has been long criticised for its disparate impact on poor women. But it placated Americans who objected to their taxes paying for a procedure they found abhorrent.
Hyde was enacted in 1976. After that, the pro-life lobby spent another decade trying to overturn Roe. Without any real success, they changed their strategy entirely. Rather than get rid of the right, they decided to make it harder to exercise.
In state legislatures, they adopted an incrementalist strategy: laws were drafted that required hospital admitting privileges for abortion providers, that required consent from parents, that created preprocedure waiting times and mandated ultrasounds, and that required that women be given specific types of pre-procedure literature and counselling. Every single measure held up in court. Over time, it got harder in many parts of the country to get an abortion.
And then, overreach. States started enacting laws requiring clinics that provided abortions to have the physical features of surgery centres. The point was, of course, to make the renovations so expensive that the clinics would just give up and shut down.
The US Supreme Court decided last year that these laws were an undue burden on the exercise of the abortion right, and they were stopped in their tracks.
Norma McCorvey, despite being the poster child for abortion rights, became a committed pro-lifer in the mid1990s. She converted to Christianity, then to Catholicism, and dedicated her life to undoing the law that bore her name.
Her death was a loss to the pro-life cause, but this lobby is heartened by President Donald Trump’s nomination of a deeply religious, pro-life justice to the vacant Supreme Court seat. Overturning Roe remains unlikely. But expect the right it secured to be further chipped away.