The Future of Choice

Continuing a trend initiated by April’s Gonzales v. Carhart Supreme Court decision, on July 6 Missouri Governor Matt Blunt signed a troubling new law. The measure places abortion clinics under government oversight by classifying them as ambulatory surgical centers. Planned Parenthood has said that the law could force it to spend up to two million dollars to remodel one of its clinics and could halt medical abortions at another site.

The law also directly affects students, allowing schools to offer abstinence-only educational programs. In addition, the law bars people affiliated with abortion providers, such as Planned Parenthood, from teaching or supplying materials for public school sex education courses, effectively blocking those most concerned for women from educating them.

“This law is dangerous to women,” said Lisa Barton, Senior Counsel for NARAL Pro-Choice America. “It is limiting pertinent information to our young people that would allow them to make informed decisions about their health.”

This setback comes shortly after Michigan pro-choice advocates celebrated the overturning of a law that would have enacted broad restrictions on abortion. The measure, known as the Legal Birth Definition Act, sought to change the legal definition of birth to the first moment any part of a fetus is outside a woman’s body.

U.S. District Judge Denise Page Hood had approved a temporary restraining order preventing the measure, which became law in June 2004, from being enforced, calling it confusing and vague. This June, a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Court of Appeals agreed, declaring the law unconstitutional. The panel ruled that the Michigan law was broader than the federal law upheld in April and could potentially apply to abortions using other methods earlier in pregnancy.

The ruling was lauded by groups like Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights. “It gives us hope that the recent Supreme Court decision won’t necessarily dictate all the rulings from now on, even in a conservative court,” said Lori Lamerand, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

“The way that the Michigan law was written, in addition to a ban on intact dilation and evacuation [a midterm abortion method], it could lead to a ban on all abortions,” said Jessica Arons, Director of the Women’s Health and Rights Program at the Center for American Progress.

Despite the small victory in Michigan, the recent developments in Missouri illustrate that April’s Supreme Court decision is still reverberating and providing ammunition to anti-choice groups. “Doctors now have to be very careful about their intent,” she said. “Instead of the health of the woman taking precedence they now have to worry about themselves.”

In Gonzales v. Carhart, the Supreme Court reversed lower court decisions and upheld the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, which was signed into law by President Bush in 2003. The law bans intact dilation and evacuation. The law contains no exception allowing for this procedure to be done when an ongoing pregnancy threatens a woman’s health.

“For 30 years there has been an exception for women’s health,” said Arons. “Now the court has said that women would have to bring their case to court on a case-by-case basis in order to get an exemption for the procedure.” By then it would most likely be too late for most women.

And contrary to what many believe, the April decision won’t reduce the number of abortions at all. The ban on intact dilation and evacuation will simply lead women to get other second trimester procedures even if they are not as safe for their particular circumstances.

“They believe this ruling will prevent ‘many’ abortions,” said Lamerand. “To the contrary—it will simply make physicians sometimes have to choose between saving a patient’s health or committing a federal crime—an untenable position for any doctor and an unprecedented situation. It won’t make abortions less numerous, but it may make them more dangerous in some instances.”

Due to the climate in the Court, reproductive rights advocates are anticipating further challenges to reproductive choice. Planned Parenthood and other reproductive freedom advocates hope that the courts rule as they did in Michigan. Said Lamerand, “This decision does seem to help define one level of interference in the right to an abortion that this particular court was not willing to cross.”

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