I choose to side with women, because they will have the responsibility for the results of that decision, and I trust their ability to weigh the alternatives carefully. The "pro-life" side picks fetuses, because they have little confidence in the moral judgment of women. These women have, after all, "gotten themselves pregnant," as one state […]

In June of 1983, the Supreme Court issued a decision that surprised people on both sides of the abortion question. Apparently returning to its earlier liberal position, it strongly rejected all parts of an Akron, Ohio, ordinance regulating abortion services and reaffirmed Roe v. Wade.97 The Akron ordinance had required a twenty-four-hour waiting period after […]

. . . every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body. judge cardozo, Schloendorff v. The Society of New York Hospital (1914) Many minors, like appellant, oppose parental notice and seek instead to preserve the fundamental, personal right to privacy. . […]

By defining abortion as an individual privacy right under the liberty clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade managed to evade the more complicated social realities that may prevent women from securing safe abortions, regardless of their formal "rights." ("Pro-choice" advocates effect the same evasion when they define "abor­tion rights" […]

Roe v. Wade The concept of "medical necessity," or "therapeutic abortion," defines nonmedical abortions as "elective," meaning they are somehow frivolous, unnecessary.5 This bifurcated view distorts reality; it denies that familial, economic, and sexual conditions, as well as those of physical health, create genuine needs that justify abortion. It also reduces the meaning of health, […]

This right of privacy… is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. justice blackmun, Roe v. Wade, Jan. 1973 I fear for the liberty and equality of the millions of women who have lived and come of age in the 16 years since Roe was decided. justice blackmun, […]

Organized opposition to abortion has never been a single-issue move­ment. The underlying message of the crusade against abortion—the mes­sage the New Right has embraced as its ideological centerpiece—is con­veyed in the defensive response by Dr. J. C. Willke, president of the NRLC, to accusations about firebombings and the harassment of abortion clinics: It is they […]

In contrast to the peace, environmental, and antinuclear movements, which also contain many religious activists and groups, the antiabortion movement, which encompasses not only Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants but also Orthodox Jews, Mormons, and Black Muslims, is narrowly religious and antisecular. As Judge Dooling commented in McRae v. Harris, "the right-to-life movement. . . does […]

The politics of the family, sexuality, and reproduction—and, most symbolically, of abortion—became a primary vehicle through which right — wing politicians sought to achieve state power in the late 1970s and the 1980 elections. In particular, the crusade against legal abortion was taken up by an ascendant New Right as the pivotal issue in a […]

Abortion derives its meanings, not from any theological text or abstract moral code, but from the particular historical conditions surrounding it. In the 1970s, those conditions—delayed marriage and increased college attendance and labor force participation, an active and vocal women’s liberation movement, and open dissemination of birth control—dramati­cally affected young unmarried women. Moreover, their impact […]