The Legacy Of Roe

IT WAS 10 YEARS AGO this week that the Supreme Court legalized abortion, yet a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy remains as controversial as ever. The anniversary of Roe v. Wade should serve as a time not for moralistic recriminations, for the past decade has shown them to be of little use swaying opinions in either direction. Rather, it should be a time of reflection--and for foes of abortion in particular, a time to rethink the unfortunate tactics that have been used to sidestep the decision.

Encouraged by a national rise in religious fundamentalism and political conservatism, the so-called "Right-to-Life" forces have proven unscrupulous in recent years in their campaign against abortion. One tactic has been violence. Several abortion clinics have been torched in the past year alone, and a doctor and his wife, heads of an Illinois clinic, were kidnapped for more than a week by anti-abortion fanatics last summer.

More mainstream abortion foes have chosen to assault not people, but coastitutionalism. A handful of bills are pending in Congress that would strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction over abortion issues, returning such power to state courts and effectively overturning Roe. Billed in the name of federalism, these bills are of dubious constitutionality at best, according to most legal scholars. In their willingness to undermine the Court to achieve victory on this single issue, proponents of these bills are using a curiously radical means towards a conservative end. Other Congressional proposals that would define the constitutional meaning of "life" as beginning at conception would do equal damage to the notion of fundamental law.

The final type of attacks on Roe is more subtle, but equally repugnant in its deceptiveness. In the past year or so, the Reagan Administration and some of its Congressional backers have introduced so-called "tattle tale" legislation. These rules, the most recent of which was proposed by Richard S. Schweiker days before his resignation last week as Health and Human Services Secretary, would require federally funded clinics to notify parents of minors who receive contraceptives. Other proposals would do the same for teenage abortion patients.

Ostensibly designed for the protection of minors, in reality these bills have been served up by the New Right in part to deter abortion. The sad irony is that, in inducing many teenagers to forego contraception, they might well increase the number of abortions--and particularly the number of dangerous and even fatal ones--performed by quacks.

This newspaper has long supported the legality of abortion, based as it is on the rights of privacy and autonomy. But minds do differ, and those that find abortion repugnant have every right to seek to outlaw it--by the accepted methods of constitutional amendment or judicial reversal. The legacy of Roe plainly will not be a harmonious resolution of the abortion controversy. But it need not be violence, deception, or constitutional subversion.