Abortion: Safe and Legal, Nationwide

WHEN REPUBLICAN NATIONAL Committee Chairman Frank Fahrenkopf was in town recently drumming up support for what he called "the party of the future," he said the Republican party has historically provided more opportunities for women than the Democratic party has.

Almost simultaneously in Washington, Attorney General Edwin Meese III asked the Supreme Court to overturn its 1973 "Roe v. Wade" ruling legalizing abortions nationwide. Meese has asked the Supreme Court to reconsider the decision that gave women the Constitutional right to end their own pregnancies.

In his Kennedy School speech, Fahrenkopf referred to the opportunity the Reagan administration has given a select few Republican women--Sandra Day O'Connor, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Elizabeth Dole--to serve in public office. What he failed to mention was that his "party of the future" would be infringing on the rights of millions of women by turning the calendar back on the abortion ruling.

The Justice Department argues that Roe v. Wade has proved "inherently unworkable" and wrongly infringes on states' rights to limit abortions. If Roe v. Wade is slashed from the law books, anti-abortion factions now gaining power in states across the nation will have nothing to prevent them from pushing legislation to illegal abortion on the state level.

By guaranteeing women the Constitutional right to safe and legal abortions, the court swiftly did away with dangerous means of ending pregnancies that have shortened thousands of women's lives over the centuries--reliance on back-alley butchers, illegal pregnancy-ending drugs and life-threatening self-abortion techniques.

The Reagan Administration's ruling would make abortions readily available to women rich enough to travel to "legal" states, but it would send poor women back to untrained doctors and illegal, life-threatening drugs. And for the women who don't want to risk their lives to end their pregnancies there will be unwanted children and children who families cannot afford to feed.

And if Roe v. Wade is repealed, there is a real possibility that anti-abortion legislation will make it through the statehouses, particularly in more traditionally conservative regions. The Boston National Organization for Women reports that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, Massachusetts anti-abortion activists are gaining support for a bill that would virtually outlaw abortion in the state. The piece of legislation would call for an end to all "public" and "private" funding for abortion, leaving women without access to state funds, and unable to use their own funds for abortions.

Similar abortion-prohibiting legislation is now receiving support in Illinois and Pennsylvania.

COMPOUNDING THE class-based injustice of the Administration's proposal, the move to reverse Roe v. Wade is grounded in manipulation of information. The court did not, as Meese has charged, give women the "unfettered right" to "abortion on demand." Roe v. Wade holds that women may not be constrained from choosing abortions in the first trimester but gives states some rights to prohibit abortions in the second trimester and the right to prohibit all but lifesaving abortions in the third trimester. Roe v. Wade found that a woman's right to make reproductive decisions is part of a "right to privacy" implicit in the 14th Ammendment to the Constitution. Judge Harry Blackmun, in the historic 1973 ruling, decided that government, when forced to choose, should defend the life/right of a woman over a "potential life" of a fetus.

The most hypocritical part of the Administration's move and other "pro-family" legislation like the Hatch Amendment--which would ban abortion--is that the very same people who condemn abortion have come out against sex education in schools, contraceptive counseling, and other methods that would cut down on the number of unwanted pregnancies. While teenagers have recently been getting pregnant more than any other age group--leading concerned groups to call for greater availability of contraceptives and counseling to end to the pitiful phenomena of "children having children"--Phyllis Schlafly and other speakers for the New Right are preaching prayer and sexual abstinence. Obviously this group hasn't noticed that such "birth control methods" haven't been too effective.

And while prayer in the schools hasn't gone over well in the courts, the abortion clinic bombers have been quite effective lately. Boston NOW reports that 10 percent of abortion clinics nationwide have been plagued by such terrorism, causing insurance rates at other clinics to skyrocket. Anti-abortion groups calling themselves "sidewalk counselors" have set themselves up in front of clinics around the country to brand the women entering and leaving with the name "baby killer."

No woman wants to be in a situation where she has to terminate a pregnancy, but she should be able to decide what to do with her own body without being terrorized or having to risk her life. Coming at the close of the United Nations Decade of Women, a decision to reverse the abortion ruling would be particularly ironic. The nation's highest court would in one blow destroy one of the most important gains women have made in the past century.