Anti-Abortion Movement

• Author: John G. West
• Pages: 92-93

Page 92

After ROE V. WADE (1973), opponents of ABORTION scrambled to find restrictions on abortion that the Supreme Court would uphold. These included laws requiring a short "cooling off" period between the request for an abortion and its performance; informed-consent laws requiring disclosure of the medical risks of abortion to women considering the procedure; medical regulations requiring that second-trimester abortions be performed in hospitals or establishing professional standards for those who perform abortions; viability regulations that would establish a uniform definition for viability or that required a doctor to determine whether the unborn child was viable before performing an abortion; and parental and spousal consent provisions. All were invariably struck down in the federal courts, leading law professor Lynn Wardle to conclude in 1981: "The courts have carried the doctrine of abortion privacy to incredible extremes.? The abortion industry ? has wrapped itself in the robes of Roe v. Wade, [has] challenged many simple and ordinary state regulations (from record-keeping laws to parental notification requirements) and today claims constitutional immunity from many medical regulations."

Given the judiciary's effective ban on any local abortion regulation during the 1970s, the anti-abortion movement soon sought other methods to achieve its goals, including the constitutional-amendment process. Several constitutional amendments dealing with abortion were introduced in Congress after the Republicans gained control of the Senate in 1980. The first would have defined the term "person" in the Fifth Amendment and the FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT as encompassing "unborn offspring at every stage of development" and provided that "[n]o unborn person shall be deprived of life by any person." Another proposal, dubbed the "Human Life Federalism Amendment," provided that a "right to abortion is not secured by this Constitution" and that "Congress and the several states shall have the concurrent power to restrict and prohibit abortions." The intent of the latter amendment was to restore to the legislative branch the power to enact laws dealing with abortion. Many in the anti-abortion movement were critical of this approach, however, believing that it did not go far enough.

When it became clear that no constitutional amendment dealing with abortion could muster sufficient support, some sought to overturn Roe by congressional statute...