Comments on the Casey decision

...learn woman-centered self-help techniques, including abortion techniques, ourselves...

...To define abortion as a matter of "more or less," the Court has encouraged a deconstruction of the right to choose: it has said that states may but need not fund abortion for poor women on Medicaid...

...that there is no right to speak freely about abortion options in federally funded clinics...

...To treat a controversial issue as something about which we can compromise, negotiate, and horse-trade, it must have parts that can be added or subtracted...

...Because pro-choice advocates are now trying to ensure fairness and uniformity in its implementation, it may be several months before the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act goes into effect...

...health care providers, who must reduce the amount of resources they devote to contraception education and services, gynecological check-ups, AIDS education, baby well-care education and services, because they must devote more resources to abortion-related services...

...When it does, pro-choice advocates will then challenge it under the undue burden clause, and other states' abortion laws will also be challenged on these grounds...

...They forget that in the state of Pennsylvania, as in most of the U.S., abortion services are generally available only in sizable cities...

...Principled issues are clean, easy to settle conceptually, if not politically...

...The Casey decision makes it less likely than ever that the abortion question will be "settled" in U.S...

...Abortion services have been closing down all over the United States, and many medical schools do not teach the procedure...

...must be taken more seriously than ever...

...But we do not usually think about rights in this way...

...An expanded grass-roots movement of women and men committed to ensuring access to abortion, in the context of a broad program of reproductive rights, will best preserve access within the context of the 426 • DISSENT law, raise political pressure to remove legal impediments to abortion access and, if necessary, provide the infrastructure for outlaw activities to further women's control over our bodies...

...Either the right to choose abortion stands as principle or it does not...

...The Casey decision opens the door to many other restrictions on access to abortion—such as requiring that abortions be performed in hospitals—that will add greatly to the costs of abortion...

...Pro-choice advocates cannot turn our backs on the state, and must continue to lobby, litigate, and elect pro-choice legislators...

...Instead, a bureaucratic morass will increasingly ooze around this right, confusing, hassling, and punishing women with unwanted pregnancies...

...But many other people will also bear the additional costs of abortion restriction: taxpayers, who pay for forms, surveillance, regulatory agencies, judges' time, and so on...

...Regulations will be written, debated, passed, challenged, overturned, refined, challenged again, in a never ending stream FALL • 1992 • 425 of laws, executive orders, legal briefs, bureaucratic forms, and data sheets...

...The right of abortion has been handed over to the hackneyed politics of committee chambers where compromise resolves political conflict...

...We should not underestimate the extent to which the decision upholds the right of a woman to choose abortion...

...But in the Casey decision, the Court says for the first time that for the sake of encouraging childbirth, states may limit, constrain, and place conditions on the exercise of a right to choose abortion...

...This likely proliferation of abortion policing and red tape appears particularly ironic at this time when the dominant political sentiment in most other spheres is to scale down state intervention and bureaucracy...

...In recent years hundreds of thousands of such activists have devoted a good deal of time and money to raising funds for abortions for poor women, providing escort services for women facing anti-choice efforts to block access to clinics, developing teen access programs, replacing federal funds withdrawn from clinics because they provide abortion counseling, bringing RU-486 from Europe in order to challenge its ban in the United States...

...How can we have "more or less" of a right to vote, to speak freely, to own property in our own names, to sit at the lunch counter of our choice...

...When teens must face all these burdens and go through a court procedure if they do not wish to involve their parents in their abortion decision, the burdens become incredible...

...Increasing the costs of abortion burdens the women who have them, especially lower-income women...

...I would like to thank Marlene Fried, Candice Hoke, Mary Littman, and Carol Sylvestre for helpful discussions...

...More than ever we need to expand activist networks in rural and urban areas to provide information and support services...

...The joining of the two statements—there is a right to choose abortion but states may restrict that right—is the supposed compromise...

...Hawks and doves can compromise on the size of the military budget, workers and managers can split the difference on wage increases...

...These added burdens on both adult and teen women may delay the abortion itself into the second trimester, often adding to the cost and health risks of the procedure...

...Most women who seek abortions have given the matter much thought, and are quite determined not to bear an unwanted child...

...A twenty-four hour waiting period forces women to take more time off from work, make more child-care arrangements, and stay overnight in the city where they receive services...

...All of this adds considerably to the cost, inconvenience, and emotional stress of obtaining an abortion...

...In spite of such obstacles, the evidence indicates that putting conditions on abortion does not stop women from terminating pregnancies...

...Some well-meaning people appear not to understand why rules like a twenty-four-hour waiting period or parental consent for teens are burdensome...

...The best strategy for ensuring access to abortion, I think, lies in maintaining and expanding such grass-roots self-organization...

...It warns those seeking to overturn Roe that such an action would undermine the rule of precedent and thus threaten the Court's legitimacy...

...But the law can at best give us only a framework for reproductive freedom, not the freedom itself...

...It upholds Roe v. Wade's arguments for a right of privacy under the Constitution as covering the decision to have an abortion and acknowledges that nothing in the intervening years has invalidated those arguments...

...They must face a series of intimidating encounters with health providers, lawyers, and judges, figure out how to get out of school several times, keep their whereabouts secret, and often make several different trips—somehow getting money for fare or getting rides—to offices, courts, and clinics...

...Hailed as a great compromise, the decision of the United States Supreme Court this past summer in Planned Parenthood v. Casey has done just this...

...support feminist health centers with broad reproductive rights agendas...

...From the decision we know that the Court considers requiring a woman to inform her husband such an undue burden, but beyond that this standard is vague...

...People and nations of integrity do not compromise their principles...

...organize to demand that more doctors learn abortion techniques and perform abortions...

...give support and protection to doctors, judges, and other professionals who provide access to abortion in the face of threats and ridicule...

...that states may but need not provide abortions in state-funded hospitals...

...Such strong language seems aimed at making it difficult for even a reconstituted Court to overturn Roe completely...

...A slogan much shouted in the last thirty years, "Not the church, not the state, women must decide our fate...

...By upholding the portions of the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act that require a woman to listen to a state-scripted, pro-childbirth lecture given by a physician, and to wait twenty-four hours before going ahead with her abortion, the Court has now left it to fifty state legislatures to cook up more "pieces" of the abortion pie, so some states will have larger and others smaller abortion rights packages...

...It has said that a woman does have the right to choose abortion without telling her husband, but if she is under eighteen she does not necessarily have the right to choose abortion without her parent's consent...

...Thus a large proportion of women seeking abortions must travel considerable distances...

...doing so amounts to selling them out...

...For those who see the abortion question as a matter of principle, however, whether pro-choice or anti-abortion, the decision is contradictory...

...concerned citizens, who give more time, energy, and money to supporting women seeking abortions and the providers that serve them...

...politics, as some people thought it was in 1973...

...Apparently Justice Sandra Day O'Connor hopes to make constitutional history with her doctrine that states cannot put an "undue burden" on a woman's access to abortion...

...provide transportation and housing...

...By legitimating a definition of the abortion issue as having two "extremes," and attempting to locate itself in the "middle," the majority opinion, despite protestations to the contrary, has played politics with women's lives...

...In spite of the predicted Bush veto, we should work to pass a national Freedom of Choice Act...