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The decision to choose abortion is hers alone

When men and women gathered, a half-million strong, from all over the United States and dozens of other countries last weekend in Washington in support of free choice for women to seek abortions, the profile of the abortion question was raised even higher than it is ordinarily. And it is ordinarily very high on the list of American citizens’ concerns.

It is also emotionally destabilizing, as some of the news coverage of the “March for Women’s Lives” showed. The warped nomenclature used in the debate—“Pro-Abortion,” “Pro-Life,” “Anti-Choice”—has skewed the argument to the point where Knoxville’s WBIR Channel 10 news program Sunday at 6 labeled the huge Washington demonstration an “Anti-Abortion Rally,” the opposite of what it was.

No one is really “Anti-Life,” but abortion opponents would have you believe that more than half of Americans are just that. In the heat of argument, in the terms of the prevailing rhetoric, even the idea that Pro-Choice might mean Anti-Abortion could apparently occur.

Abortion, and a woman’s right to obtain one legally, may be the single most difficult issue to resolve in this country. It is largely an issue in black and white, without the grey areas in which some compromise could be forged. That is, in itself, not a bad thing.

Either abortion is a medical procedure to terminate a pregnancy, or it is murder. The law of the land, in the form of the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, says that it is a lawful medical procedure to which a woman is entitled under the U.S. Constitution.

It left the decision to terminate a pregnancy to the individual woman and her doctor. Since then, attempts to end the legal practice of abortion by limiting that right have been made in just about every jurisdiction in the United States. We’ve hardly been exempt here from the abortion debate and its sometimes irrational consequences.

Currently before the Tennessee General Assembly are measures that would amend the state Constitution to allow legislators, ultimately, to take away that right by their vote. That’s unconscionable. It may come up every year, but it’s an issue in which states and their legislatures have no standing on which to act. It is impossible to regulate abortion at the state level in ways that take a woman’s rights in the matter into full consideration. Likewise, it is not the states’ purview to determine whether abortion should be reclassified as a crime, as it was before the Roe v. Wade ruling.

For any state to create barriers to abortion that are more difficult to surmount than those the federal government might impose is to create a legal nightmare. In reverse, but highly relevant, logic, that sort of state action would be tantamount to having murder a crime in some jurisdictions but not in others.

It is a federal, national issue, purely and simply and unquestionably, and it has been answered, in spite of the fervor of minority opposition. The Court has ruled that the Constitution establishes the woman’s right. Polls conducted across the land, including Tennessee, have concluded that a majority of Americans favors leaving the matter to the discretion of each woman and her doctor. The right to choose a legal abortion over carrying a fetus to childbirth is a protected right. It is not something to be trifled with by states, no matter how their lawmakers are elected.

If the Congress of the United States should continue to tamper—and it probably will—with the right of a woman to obtain an abortion, any of its actions will be subject to Court review. That’s the way the American system works, and it works well. Amending the U.S. Constitution to put the matter out of the hands of the Court’s justices is an option that is open to those who would restrict or ban abortion. But such a tactic would fail unless a clear majority of Americans decided that a woman’s private decisions are their business to intercede in. That is awfully unlikely, given the respect that people have shown for the woman’s right to her own choices involving her own body.

It is perfectly understandable that many, many people would think that an abortion is unthinkable to them. Women will always be challenged with the question of whether or not to bear a child. But imposing the will, as a matter of law, of one class of abortion opinion on all women who become pregnant is not an answer that lends any respect to the individual woman and her personal privacy.

April 29, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 18 © 2004 Metro Pulse