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After months of suspense, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling Monday on a case from Missouri, Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services.
At issue was a Missouri law which stated that life begins at conception, required physicians to perform extensive tests if they had reason to believe that a pregnancy was more than 20 weeks along, and forbade abortions in public-funded health facilities.
A federal district court overturned the Missouri law, saying it was in conflict with Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 decision which essentially legalized abortion throughout the United States. The Supreme Court held then that people have rights to privacy in certain matters, and that this right of personal privacy superseded any state interest in restricting abortion.
Missouri appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case. How could the court do otherwise, when three of its nine justices were appointed by Ronald Reagan, who promised to pack the federal judiciary with anti-abortion judges? It does happen, from time to time, that politicians actually do keep campaign promises.
Now the Supreme Court has ruled, in a close 5-4 decision, that states do have some power to regulate abortion. Women can no longer assume that abortion is a constitutional right. Instead, access to abortions will depend upon the actions of 50 state legislatures.
Our own legislators must be ecstatic that they managed to adjourn their special summer session last week. Otherwise, the shrill pickets from both sides would be set up on the Capitol steps, and the normal business of the General Assembly -- arranging subsidies for the trucking industry, fighting with the governor, lunching with lobbyists, increasing prison sentences and then wondering why the penitentiaries are overcrowded -- would grind to a halt.
But the General Assembly's reprieve is only temporary.
Come January, even the most pro-life
state senators
will be muttering dark curses about the Supreme Court.
There is absolutely no way that the legislature can pass an
abortion law which will please everyone, and yet the
General Assembly will be under constant pressure to do
something about abortion.
Colorado's abortion attitudes are rather ambivalent. In 1967, the state passed the most liberal abortion law in the nation. But in 1984, Colorado voters approved, by a narrow margin, an amendment which prohibited the use of tax money to pay for abortions.
That may be ambivalent, but it's also sensible. The
Colorado abortion philosophy is along the lines of Do
whatever you want to do -- that's up to your conscience and
your doctor. But don't expect me to pay for it.
Unfortunately, maintaining that reasonable compromise will be impossible. It's safe to predict that when the legislature convenes again in January of an election year, there will be scores of demonstrators who will demand that Colorado go on record as favoring the right to an abortion at any time.
There will also be herds of demonstrators who will shout
that life begins at conception. Merely regulating abortion
won't be enough to suit the hard-core pro-life
advocates. The next time a pregnant woman goes horseback
riding and miscarries, they'll want her prosecuted for
murder. They'll want some new crimes: Felony Fetal Abuse,
perhaps, when a pregnant woman walks into a smoke-filled
room, and Misdemeanor Gestational Neglect when a woman eats
white sugar, white flour, bacon, apples, or whatever else
comes up as the Toxin-of-the-Month.
Life on Capitol Hill will be dismal as our legislators are stalked, day and night, by vociferous and grating advocates from both sides of the abortion controversy. No matter where the senators and representatives go, no matter what other state business there is to discuss, no matter what abortion laws the legislature eventually passes -- the controversy will continue, and they'll be right in the middle of it.
That's a terrible fate. The one consolation is that, considering the way our legislature performs, it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of people.
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