FROM THE PRESIDENT
Wanda Franz, Ph.D.
MISREPRESENTING ROE v. WADE
The following quotes exemplify duplicitous incompetence (in boldface):
In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that state laws which made it illegal to have an abortion up to three months of pregnancy were unconstitutional, and that the decision on whether a woman should have an abortion up to three months of pregnancy should be left to the woman and her doctor to decide. In general, do you favor or oppose this part of the U.S. Supreme Court decision making abortions up to three months of pregnancy legal?
--question used by the Harris poll from 1973 to at least 1998 (www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll)
The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision established a woman's constitutional right to have an abortion, at least in the first three months of pregnancy. Would you like to see the Supreme Court overturn its Roe v. Wade decision, or not?
--Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll question, 5/22-24/2002
The 1973 Supreme Court ruling called Roe v. Wade made abortion in the first three months of pregnancy legal. Do you think President Bush should nominate Supreme Court justices who would uphold the Roe v. Wade decision, or nominate justices who would overturn the Roe v. Wade decision?
--Associated Press-IPSOS poll question, 11/19-21/2004
If President Bush has to nominate a replacement for any of the nine justices, the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that allowed legal abortions in the first three months of pregnancy is certain to be a central issue. The survey found that 59 percent of respondents said they favor choosing a nominee who would uphold Roe v. Wade, while 31 percent wanted a nominee who would overturn the ruling.
--AP story on the AP-IPSOS poll by Will Lester, 11/29/2004
The 1973 Supreme Court ruling called Roe v. Wade made abortion in the first three months of pregnancy legal. Do you think President Bush should nominate Supreme Court justices who uphold the Roe v. Wade decision, or nominate Supreme Court justices who would overturn the Roe v. Wade decision?
--Quinnipiac University poll, 12/7-12/2004
By a 50 percent to 34 percent margin, voters say Bush should nominate justices who would uphold the Roe v. Wade decision making abortion legal in the first three months of pregnancy.
--Joseph Straw reporting on the Quinnipiac poll in the New Haven Register, 12/16/2004
Abortion--The deliberate termination of a pregnancy before the fetus is capable of living outside the womb has generally been legal in the United States since 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled (in Roe v. Wade) that abortion cannot be prohibited during the first three months of pregnancy.
--New York Times 2005 Almanac, p. 368
Roe v. Wade (1973)--In a controversial ruling the Court held that state laws restricting abortion were an unconstitutional invasion of a woman's right to privacy. Only in the last trimester of pregnancy, when the fetus achieved viability outside the womb, might states regulate abortion--except when the life or health of the mother was at stake.
--the same New York Times 2005 Almanac, p. 127
This sort of polling and reporting on the legality of abortion is equivalent to saying that the First Amendment specifies that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion"--and leaving out the parts about the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right to assemble and petition the government. No wonder that, after 32 years of media misrepresentation, the public is still confused about Roe v. Wade.
A few weeks ago, I participated in a public radio call-in program in Wisconsin. After I had talked about the Roe v. Wade decision making abortion legal for all nine months of pregnancy, a caller informed me that I was wrong. She herself had read the Roe v. Wade ruling, and it legalized abortion only in the first trimester, etc.
It appears that the caller may have neither read nor understood the companion decision to Roe, namely Doe v. Bolton, or any of the Court's subsequent decisions on abortion. Or she may have assumed that Supreme Court decisions are forever fixed in their interpretation and not subject to revision and reinterpretation by the Court. And, quite likely, she may have absorbed the constant misrepresentations of Roe v. Wade by polling firms and the mainstream press.
In Roe v. Wade, the Court supposedly gave the states the power to restrict abortion after viability--only to take it back with a health exception in Doe v. Bolton, the ruling issued together with Roe. The health exception is so broad that the psychological stress of being pregnant is an adequate "health" reason for a woman to have an abortion-the more so, since the abortionist himself gets to decide if the health exception applies.
The Supreme Court is free to reinterpret or expand any of its past rulings. (Roe v. Wade, of course, should be reversed because it lacks any constitutional basis.) And because Roe is a particularly egregious example of "legislating from the bench," the Court has been tinkering with it in several rulings since 1973 in order to save it. Worse, in the Planned Parenthood v. Casey ruling of 1992, the Court arrogantly demanded that there be an end to all requests that it reverse itself on Roe.
Since the original Roe decision, the Court has, among other things, abandoned the trimester scheme; abandoned the extra-constitutional right to "privacy" as a basis of the right to abortion and somehow replaced it with the "liberty" guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment; ruled that the father of the child need not be notified about the abortion; and used the health exception to strike down Nebraska's law banning partial-birth abortions.
So this is what Roe v. Wade is today: A woman may legally have an abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy--even a partial-birth abortion--as long as she finds an abortionist ready to solve her "health" problem.
We need honesty and competence in the media, the "fourth estate." We need respect for the Constitution and the separation of powers in the unelected judiciary, the third branch of government. Therefore, we need the U.S. Senate to confirm President Bush's judicial nominees. Let your senators know this.