Editorials
COMMONWEAL 'Roe' redux Even though defeated at the last moment by its highest court, the Irish government's attempt to bar a fourteen-year-old girl from traveling to England for an abortion...
...Now the Rehnquist Court under full steam may return to the original decision and the road not taken in the '70s...
...The girl's circumstances (she is pregnant as the result of rape) fall into the hard-cases-make-bad-law category...
...These leaders therefore are hoping for a decision that will overthrow the Roe v. Wade decision altogether, rather than whittling it away by merely affirming the Pennsylvania statute...
...The Burger Court consistently ruled these unconstitutional...
...4: 13 March 1992 Commonweal...
...Law of itself will not persuade women and men in individual situations that they should honor fetal life...
...The weapon will be put to immediate use in this country, even though in the United States the question is not whether there are any grounds for permitting abortion but whether there are any for restricting it...
...By overreaching, then, Ireland's attorney general has handed the prochoice movement a potent weapon, one that has been blunted but not sheathed by the High Court's decision...
...The precipitous panic of prochoicers is unnecessary...
...As we move into a post-Roe world, acrimonious debate, media bias, and violence in the name of civil disobedience will continue to mark the abortion question...
...perhaps some would even follow the general outlines of Roe...
...Second, through much of the 1970s state legislatures tested what those "important state interests" might be through measures requiring parental notification and consent, spousal notification and consent, informed consent procedures, waiting periods, and safety provisions...
...Several states, including Ohio, Missouri, and Massachusetts, passed legislation similar to various provisions of the Pennsylvania law...
...In either case, state legislatures and voters finally would be given the chance to enact their views—or at least some of them—into state law...
...Whether women made pregnant through rape or incest must be morally bound to reject abortion may be debated among ethicists and theologians...
...In the service of that view, it is helpful to return again to the decision itself and to 1973...
...Overthrowing Roe, they believe, would set the stage for enactment of a national law—the Freedom of Choice Act—that would replace Roe, be less vulnerable to Court interpretation, and avoid the patchwork of abortion law that would arise from individual states enacting their own abortion laws...
...Others active in the debate, both prolife and prochoice, may he more ready to rely on half measures in the legal arena...
...In this presidential campaign year, when all the Democratic candidates, like lemmings, have already signed on to the idea of federal abortion legislation, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) and other pro-abortion groups think this strategy has a chance...
...Were the Congress to short-circuit this process by passing the Freedom of Choice Act, it would certainly not end the debate over abortion...
...Of course, this will happen in the states too, but in the legislatures of fifty states there can be a resolution of the abortion issue that would, at least very roughly, honor the diversity and ambivalence—moral, regional, and political—that the American people express on abortion...
...some legal restrictions on abortion will "teach" us that there is value to fetal life...
...The Court may well uphold the Pennsylvania law, but Commonweal 13 March 1992: 3 it need not and probably will not overturn Roe...
...For finally it is attention to those realms that will help reduce the number of abortions...
...So wrote Justice Harry Blackmun for the majority: "...Appellants and some amici argue that the woman's right is absolute and that she is entitled to terminate her pregnancy at whatever time, in whatever way, and for whatever reason she alone chooses...
...The very attempt was a foolish mistake—even in Ireland, where there is a prolife consensus that was expressed in a national referendum...
...Some would be highly restrictive, while others would not...
...using the apparatus of state power to make one such victim a virtual prisoner of her country, thereby compelling her to complete a pregnancy imposed on her by violence, would have been an abuse of power...
...It would make its own legislative process and congressional elections—the focus of single-issue politics from both sides...
...Irish law forbids all abortions except to save the life of the mother...
...COMMONWEAL 'Roe' redux Even though defeated at the last moment by its highest court, the Irish government's attempt to bar a fourteen-year-old girl from traveling to England for an abortion serves to reinforce the deepest suspicions of the prochoice movement about the ultimate goals of those working to restrict the right to abortion...
...The very best of them may do so in order to turn their full attention to the potential of moral and social persuasion...
...for the government to enforce that ban by also restricting the right to travel raises in stark form the question of how far those morally opposed to abortion will go in using civil law to compel compliance with their moral views...
...Yet the law is a teacher...
...First, there never was a fundamental or absolute right to abortion...
...Groups like NARAL and Operation Rescue will not be satisfied with halfway measures...
...With this we do not agree....A state may properly assert important interests in safeguarding health, in maintaining medical standards, and in protecting potential life...
...That should not deter those able to see beyond the law to the social and economic deprivations that drive some women toward the abortion solution, and the moral and cultural forces that serve to justify that choice...
...But the number of abortions will decline significantly only when moral sensitivities and cultural proclivities make people stop and think...
...The privacy right involved, therefore, cannot be said to be absolute...
...In our culture, with its short memory, it is no surprise to hear cries of dismay when the "time-honored" and "fundamental" right to abortion is threatened...
...Among proabortion leaders, the decision of the Supreme Court to consider the constitutionality of a Pennsylvania statute requiring spousal notification, parental consent for minors, informed consent procedures, and a twenty-four-hour waiting period has raised that threat...
...the anticipatory celebration of prolifers is unwarranted...
...Of course, the Court, now conservative, activist, and apparently harboring no inclination to judicial restraint, may simply overthrow the decision and return to the states the prerogative of shaping their own laws on the matter...
...If it upholds the Pennsylvania limits and restrictions, the Court could legitimately argue that it is making a reasonable and honest alternative reading of the original decision...
...Prolife forces in Ireland are willing to go very far indeed...
...At some point in pregnancy, these respective interests become sufficiently compelling to sustain regulation of the factors that govern the abortion decision...
Vol. 119 • March 1992 • No. 5
