A Spreading Peril for Women’s Privacy and Freedom

A Spreading Peril for Women’s Privacy and Freedom
By DOROTHY SAMUELS
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/opinion/10mon4.html?th&emc=th


Supporters of abortion rights held a lunch recently in honor of a momentous victory for their cause: 40 years ago, New York became the first state to fully legalize abortion.

That 1970 law began to reduce the death and injury toll from back-alley abortions and set the stage for the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, which made abortion legal nationwide and recognized a constitutional right to privacy.

But abortion-rights groups are newly anxious about new assaults on women’s reproductive rights, including a fight over abortion that snarled the last days of the health care reform debate. Anti-abortion groups are newly emboldened.

The health care reform law contains advances for women’s reproductive health care, including enlarged access to insurance coverage for maternity care, contraception and other services. But President Obama and pro-choice Congressional lawmakers made abortion coverage vulnerable as part of the effort to secure the measure’s passage.

Kelli Conlin, head of Naral Pro-Choice New York, told guests at the lunch that “anti-choice forces are mobilizing in every single state to limit a woman’s access to abortion in more insidious ways than we can imagine.”

As Ms. Conlin was speaking, members of the Oklahoma House were getting ready to override vetoes of two punishing abortion measures. The state’s Democratic governor, Brad Henry, rightly viewed these intrusions into women’s lives and decision-making as unconstitutional.

One of the measures, which seems destined to spawn copycat bills in other states, requires women to undergo an ultrasound before getting an abortion and further mandates that a doctor or technician set up the monitor so the woman can see it and hear a detailed description of the fetus.

The other law grants protection from lawsuits to doctors who deliberately withhold fetal testing results that might affect a woman’s decision about whether to carry her pregnancy to term.

Several states have either passed or are considering bills that would ban abortion coverage in insurance plans sold through the state exchanges established by the federal health care law.

A new Utah law criminalizes certain behavior by women that results in miscarriage. Embarking on a road that could lead to the Supreme Court, Nebraska last month banned most abortions at the 20th week of pregnancy based on a questionable theory of fetal pain.

About two dozen states are looking at bills to increase counseling requirements or waiting periods prior to abortions. About 20 states are considering new ultrasound requirements. This is on top of an already onerous regimen of state restrictions that has drastically cut down on abortion providers and curtailed a woman’s ability to exercise a constitutionally protected right.

“One in three women in this country will have an abortion in her lifetime, and yet we’re having exactly the same discussions and debates we were having forty years ago,” Ms. Conlin said.

Anti-abortion forces aim ultimately to make abortion illegal. So far, by reducing the number of abortion providers, making insurance coverage more expensive and harder to get, and throwing up other obstacles, they have primarily succeeded in making it harder for women of modest and meager means to obtain a safe and legal medical procedure.

The painful decision to end a pregnancy should be made in private between a woman and her doctor — not in politically driven debate among members of Congress and state legislatures.