Roe v Wade 35 years after the decision

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By Kenneth Lowe | Sunday, January 20, 2008 2:05 AM CST | () comments

SPRINGFIELD — Thirty-five years have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Roe v. Wade case to legalize abortion.

But since that landmark ruling on Jan. 22, 1973, the struggle between abortion rights advocates and anti-abortion activists has only grown more heated.

Supporters on both sides of the abortion argument say the issue will continue to simmer in 2008. The spotlight is on the presidential race and an effort at the state level to finally write rules to enforce the Illinois parental notification law.

When it comes to abortion, Illinois stands out among other Midwestern states. Until 1995, it was the only state not to have statutes ordering minors seeking an abortion to first inform, or acquire the consent of their parents.

Even after a parental notification law was approved by the General Assembly in 1995, the Illinois Supreme Court refused to write rules for the law until 2006, when Attorney General Lisa Madigan urged the court to begin enforcing it.

“I guess the most promising thing right now is that the Illinois Supreme Court, back in 2006, took action on writing the rules necessary for our parental notification law to go into effect,” said Bill Beckman, executive director of the Chicago-based Illinois Right to Life Committee.

Beckman said the lack of parental involvement laws in Illinois has encouraged women from surrounding states to have abortions in Illinois.

“It makes Illinois a dumping ground for people trying to bring minors to Illinois to get abortions,” he said.

Illinois has an abortion rate more in line with the national average, while the surrounding states all have abortion rates well below it, according to a recent study from the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health research group.

Numbers show that minors will cross borders to get abortions, said Helena Silverstein, professor of government and law at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, who has studied the effects of parental involvement laws in several states.

“There is good evidence that, if there are nearby states that don’t have parental involvement mandates, minors in good numbers will cross the borders to get abortions in those states,” she said.

Beckman predicts Illinois abortion numbers will decrease once the state notification law goes into effect.

“I would speculate that there could be a significant drop in these out-of-state abortions or ones with unknown origin,” he said.

Despite a lack of enforcement of the laws, Illinois experienced a 19 percent decrease in the rate of abortions between 2000 and 2005, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The national rate of reported abortions has dropped to the lowest rate seen since Roe v. Wade went into effect.

Beckman said Democratic control of Illinois government makes it tough for abortion opponents to achieve their goals.

“At this point, with the configuration of our Legislature and governor, it’s hard to get anything done,” he added.

State Rep. Roger Eddy, R-Hutsonville, said efforts to alter parental notification laws often focus on whether there should be exceptions for minors in cases of incest or abuse. But he thinks the state law already addresses those issues.

“Any attempt to deal with parental notification is purely out of the camp that believes there shouldn’t be any,” he said.

Lacking the ability to completely overturn Roe v. Wade, Silverstein said the anti-abortion movement’s nationwide strategy has been one of trying to narrowly restrict abortion rights, with the result being a proliferation of consent laws, waiting periods and bans on partial-birth abortion among many states.

“People celebrate or deride the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, but, at this point, the real precedent of consequence isn’t Roe v. Wade, it’s Planned Parenthood vs. Casey in 1992,” she said, referring to a case establishing the constitutionality of parental notification and consent laws, as well as waiting periods.

For notification laws to be constitutional, they must allow minors to ask a court for permission to have an abortion without informing their parents. Silverstein said parental involvement laws such as the notification law in Illinois appeal to people’s common sense, but do not work in practice as intended because many courts are either ignorant of their responsibility to hold those hearings or they simply refuse to hear them.

“The protections that are supposed to be given to minors under those laws don’t work in the real world,” she said.

Nationally, the struggle over abortion rights came to a head in 2007, when a Supreme Court decision upheld a ban on so-called “partial-birth abortion.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the only woman on the Supreme Court, wrote a scathing dissent of the decision.

Brigid Leahy, vice president of the Illinois Planned Parenthood Council, said after the decision that one of her organization’s biggest concerns is the presidential race and what new Supreme Court appointments will do to the court’s position on abortion.

In particular, she points to the high court’s partial-birth abortion decision.

“They were confronted with the issue of a woman’s health, and, for the first time in

35 years, they decided that a woman’s health doesn’t matter,” she said. “They decided that the legislative bodies can trump a woman’s health.”

Leahy said the upcoming election could potentially threaten the continued existence of

Roe v. Wade.

“The next president may be the one who determines if we still have Roe v. Wade,” she added.