Gallup poll: 64% of Americans agree that "The decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician."

In the summer of 1972, half a year before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade.

A majority of all identified groups, including Catholics, agreed with that statement. There was almost no difference between men and women. The group expressing the strongest agreement – 68 percent – was made up of Republicans. George Gallup’s syndicated column discussing the poll results, “Abortion Seen Up to Woman, Doctor,” ... was... in Justice Blackmun’s files.

And Justice Blackmun, the Nixon appointee who wrote the Roe v. Wade opinion, had that column in his files. Also in his files:

[A]n account by Dr. Jane E. Hodgson, a Mayo Clinic-trained obstetrician/gynecologist, of her arrest in St. Paul in 1970 for performing a first-trimester abortion for a patient who had contracted German measles in the fourth week of pregnancy. (In those days before immunization eradicated the threat posed to pregnant women by German measles, the disease commonly caused serious birth defects.) Justice Harry A. Blackmun, formerly the Mayo Clinic’s lawyer, knew Dr. Hodgson’s story; I had found her account, published in the clinic’s alumni magazine, in the justice’s files at the Library of Congress.

That's from a long column by Linda Greenhouse, referencing historical materials collected here. The column also talks about the post-Roe political strategy of the Republican Party, which we were just discussing a couple days ago here. The idea is that Republicans were for it before they were against it.

(Feel free to relate this post to the previous post about Second Amendment rights, which Democrats don't believe in.)

Read more ►

40 years ago today, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Roe v. Wade.

Justice Blackmun wrote:

The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however... the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution. In varying contexts, the Court or individual Justices have, indeed, found at least the roots of that right in the First Amendment.... or in the concept of liberty guaranteed by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment.... These decisions make it clear that only personal rights that can be deemed "fundamental" or "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty"...  are included in this guarantee of personal privacy....

This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent. Specific and direct harm medically diagnosable even in early pregnancy may be involved. Maternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the woman a distressful life and future. Psychological harm may be imminent. Mental and physical health may be taxed by child care. There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it. In other cases, as in this one, the additional difficulties and continuing stigma of unwed motherhood may be involved. All these are factors the woman and her responsible physician necessarily will consider in consultation.

Was the state's interest in protecting the unborn child sufficient to permit some regulation? The answer was yes, but not before the "viability" of the unborn. As to whether the killing of that pre-viable entity ought to be seen as the killing of a human being, justifying rescue by the state, the Court refused "to endorse any theory that life, as we recognize it, begins before live birth," since "those trained in... medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus."

Pre-viability, the decision whether to continue with a pregnancy would rest with the woman within whose body the mysterious process was taking place, and it would not be the role of the state to make that decision for her, no matter how firmly the majority of the people believe they have solved the mystery and they know that what she is doing is murdering a child.

Read more ►