[Marxism] New wave of restrictions coming after Supreme Court guts right to choose

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

New York Times
April 20, 2007
New Push Likely for Restrictions Over Abortions 
By KIRK JOHNSON
DENVER, April 19 - Both sides of the abortion debate expect a new push for
restrictions as state lawmakers around the country digest the implications
of the Supreme Court decision Wednesday upholding a federal ban on a type of
abortion. 

But such legislation could face headwinds in states where voters in the last
election sent large numbers of Democrats - many of them abortion rights
advocates - into office for the first time. 

Seventeen houses or senates in the states shifted position on abortion after
the November elections - 15 toward more abortion rights and 2 toward greater
restrictions - according to an analysis by Naral Pro-Choice America. The
group says six new governors supporting abortion rights were elected,
compared with one who had voiced strong views against abortion.

"Something this drastic is going to energize both sides," said Katherine
Grainger, the director of the state program at the Center for Reproductive
Rights, an abortion rights legal advocacy group based in New York. The
organization represented some of the doctors involved in the Supreme Court
case decided Wednesday.

The reasoning of both the court's majority opinion upholding the
restrictions and the dissent gave encouragement to opponents of abortion.
The ruling, they said, will bolster their argument that the issues raised by
abortion - among them defining fully informed consent by women who want to
end pregnancies and the question of when a fetus feels pain - are legitimate
topics for state legislation.

"The case does not give us a new issue, it reinforces the issue and gives us
an opportunity to use it," said Mary S. Balch, the director of for state
legislation at the National Right to Life Committee.

Ms. Balch and other legislative experts said that North Dakota, Missouri,
Georgia, South Carolina, Texas and Alabama, where legislators are still
meeting and anti-abortion legislation is on the table, were probably the
places to watch for now. 

Only hours after the Supreme Court's ruling, a lawmaker in Alabama
introduced a measure that would ban almost all abortions in the state. Most
states have adjourned their legislatures for the year or passed the deadline
for introducing new bills.

Some scholars of the abortion debate say that all the tilting and jousting
of politics and the technical legal issues raised by the Supreme Court in
upholding, by a 5-to-4 vote, the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Act are
beside the point. 

What the court really did, said Anne Hendershott, a professor of sociology
at the University of San Diego, was reframe the debate about how abortion
should be discussed.

The court did not talk about big concepts and issues like privacy, but about
the small, gripping details of how abortion works, said Professor
Hendershott, author of "The Politics of Abortion" (Encounter, 2006).

Focusing on such details, she said, is how so-called "incrementalists" are
trying to chip away at the availability of abortion. These opponents try to
make women, doctors and other health professionals talk more, in some cases
a lot more, about the actual consequences and mechanics of abortion.

With the court's ruling and the new fuel it gives to the strategy of
encouraging those discussions, Professor Hendershott said, the
incrementalists have won the debate - if not over abortion, then at least
over how to fight it.

"This case changes the conversation," she said. "The battle between the
incrementalists and those who wanted a constitutional amendment was won by
the incrementalists."

Some lawmakers who are backing anti-abortion bills in their states said the
ruling helped them by declaring that some specific restrictions are
constitutional. The Supreme Court has never before upheld a ban on a
specific kind of abortion. 

The emphasis in the court's ruling was also much less on the health or
well-being of the pregnant woman, but on the risks and consequences of an
abortion to her and her fetus. This makes discussion of an abortion's
potentially negative consequences easier, the lawmakers said.

"It certainly doesn't hurt," said James Mills, a Republican state
representative from Gainesville, Ga. Mr. Mills is the chief sponsor of a
bill in the Legislature that would require doctors to offer patients seeking
abortions the choice of viewing an ultrasound image of the fetus.

In South Carolina, lawmakers are also debating a law involving ultrasound.
One approach would have required a woman to view the ultrasound image of her
fetus before the abortion could be performed. The other says the option must
be offered to the woman by her doctor. 

State Senator Kevin Bryant, a Republican from Anderson and a sponsor of one
of the bills, said abortions of the sort addressed by the Supreme Court were
already illegal in South Carolina. But Mr. Bryant said the ruling could
provide some momentum to other restrictions. 

"We may also look down the road and end up seeing some other procedures that
should be restricted too," he said. "We don't want to do too much at one
time."

Legislators in North Dakota are looking at legislation that would
immediately ban abortion statewide if Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court
case that made abortion legal, is overturned.

The Mississippi Legislature passed just such a bill earlier this year,
banning nearly all abortions if the ruling is overturned. The law was signed
Thursday by Gov. Haley Barbour, a Republican.

But some winds are blowing the other way.

In Oklahoma, the Democratic governor, Brad Henry, vetoed legislation
Wednesday that would ban state facilities and workers from performing
abortions except to save the life of the pregnant woman. Mr. Henry, who has
supported some restrictions on abortion in the past, said the bill went too
far. Supporters of the bill, which passed overwhelmingly in both houses,
hope to override the veto. 

Last month, Gov. Dave Freudenthal of Wyoming, a Democrat, vetoed a bill that
would have created a new category of homicide if a pregnant woman was
murdered and her unborn fetus died. Mr. Freudenthal said in his veto message
that he thought the bill was probably unconstitutional.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York, a Democrat, told an abortion rights group
Thursday that he would fight to keep abortion legal in his state.

Some opponents of abortion said that, until the Supreme Court's ruling, this
had not been a particularly good year for their cause.

In part this may have been because of the changed composition in state
legislatures and in part because of what many politicians saw as a backlash
when South Dakota tried to ban most abortions last year. The Legislature
passed a sweeping ban, only to see the public repeal it in a statewide
referendum.

"This particular legislative session was a tough year for us," said Ms.
Balch of the National Right to Life Committee. "We had some victories, but
we would have liked more."

She said lawmakers in South Dakota seemed to be taking a year off after last
year's defeat. Virginia, often a hotbed of anti-abortion discussion, has
been quiet too, she said.

Dan Frosch contributed reporting from Denver.





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