abortion-in-the-united-states

"The most important thing is, can we agree on the goal? Is the goal the absolute abolition of abortion in our nation?"

"My body, my choice."

"Your body, my choice."

"We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, in this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer."

"Except for the exchange of personal opinion or medical speculation, there is no evidence of constitutional study or consideration. Only Chief Justice Burger attempted to anchor the discussion in the Constitution, expressing the patent federalism objection that "the states have,..., as much concern in this area as in any within their province; federal power has only that which can be traced to a specific provision of the Constitution." [Memorandum to the Conference from Warren Burger, dated May 31, 1972]. There is little other argument or discussion in the internal correspondence touching upon the substance of constitutional law."

"As one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation, the Texas law, passed in 1858, prohibited abortion unless it was necessary to save the life of the mother. Roe, unmarried and pregnant, challenged the law. She claimed it violated her constitutional right to privacy and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment."

"1. The Court’s decision in Roe touched off a national controversy over the politics of abortion that shows no signs of abating. Similarly, Roe sparked a continuing debate among scholars about the legitimacy of privacy as a constitutional right and the role of the Court in the political process. Nearly a quarter century after the decision, perhaps we should reconsider why the decision is so controversial. What, precisely, does Roe stand for? In the issue in Roe about whether we, males and females alike, have the right to control our bodies? Is the issue whether women should be autonomous with regard to decisions they make about matters of reproduction? Or is the issue about the question of when life begins? About whether a fetus is a “person” in a constitutional sense? About patriarchy and gender discrimination?"

"Thus, although the logic of Roe v. Wade leaves much to be desired, the result affirms themes central to a major tradition of American constitutionalism. The effect of that decision is to deny the individual states the right to consider, in shaping their abortion policies, the community's interest in protecting the fetus. In effect, the Court was saying that the question of whether a woman has the right to procure an abortion is not an issue to be effectively considered in the public realm. Thus, oddly enough, free speech cannot be used here to influence the development of public policy. The decision seems perfectly consistent with Madisonian liberalism: the constitutional order is to serve the individual and his interest. In the Supreme Court's Weltanschauung, society is not viewed as fundamentally communitarian in nature. Just as the apportionment cases see the individual voter as an autonomous political agent, Roe v. Wade sees the human person as an autonomous moral agent. A woman is thus entitled to separate herself from the community while the community is rendered powerless to act in its common defense for the purpose of safeguarding shared values. It is the Fourteenth Amendment concept of "liberty" that is given overwhelming significance in Roe v. Wade, to the virtual exclusion of countervailing considerations that might have been deemed to inhere in the related concepts of "person" and "life." As one writer noted: "The basic assumption of the whole [American] system is very clear: no partial community may impose its substantive vision of the good life on the whole community. On the level of the whole, our unity is formal, not substantive. ' 86 In another sense, however, the Supreme Court did underscore the importance of unity, although not the unity or a community glued together by a moral consensus. In the Court's view, this moral consensus does not exist, and the Court is probably correct here. It appears that Justice Blackmun's dreary recitation of the history of moral and philosophical thinking about abortion was actually intended to illustrate this lack of consensus. What other reason could there have been for his long prologue to the merits of the case? Surely it provided no theological or scientific basis for dividing pregnancy into three periods and formulating different constitutional rules pertaining to each. The Court's interest seemed to lie in the promotion of social peace-a policy of "live and let live"-best achieved through the constitutional right of privacy."

"Bailey’s libertarian reading go the amendment, in which the right to freedom outweighs any other consideration, may seem unsatisfying, both morally and as an account of the amendment’s purpose. Its vision of society may appear more harmonious with the constitutionalization of laissez-faire individualism in Lochner v. Newyor,53 decided six years before Bailey, than with modern sensibilities. The modern administrative state needs to interfere with traditional individual liberties in myriad ways, some of them vitally linked to the promotion of women’s equality. This way be why, when an amicus in Roe relied on Bailey’s libertarianism to argue for a thirteenth amendment right to abortion, the Court expressly rejected the view “that one has an unlimited right to do with one’s body as one pleases”"

"The most impressive attempts to anchor the right to abortion in the Constitution’s text have been built on the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment. These have argued that the real issue in the abortion controversy is not privacy, but the equality of women Sylvia Law has shown how sex equality concerns are implicated when laws outlawing abortion “impose upon women burdens of unwanted pregnancy that men do not bear,” and correctly observed that “[n]othing the Supreme Court has ever done has been more concretely important for women than its decision in Roe.” The difficulties of this argument stem from the indeterminacy of sex discrimination doctrine: the Court has never made clear what the “intermediate scrutiny” to which sex-based classifications are subject amounts to, so it is difficult for a defense of abortion that relies upon it to secure enough doctrinal traction to get where it wants to go."

"While many of us associate the abortion right with Roe's author, Justice Harry Blackmun, mid-December 1971 correspondence actually identifies William O. Douglas to be the strongest advocate for abortion as an extension of his earlier opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) invalidating a Connecticut law limiting the use of artificial contraception. (Letter from William O. Douglas to Chief Justice Warren Burger, dated December 18, 1971. Following oral argument, the Justices discuss cases and take a straw vote. The senior justice in the majority [or the Chief Justice if he is in the majority] then usually assigns the opinion writing. Chief Justice Burger reports that the discussion following the first [Roe] argument was so confused, that there were "literally not enough columns to mark up an accurate reflection of the voting." [Letter from Warren Burger to William O. Douglas, dated December 20, 1971]. Out of expedience, perhaps, Burger assigned the draft writing to Blackmun, his fellow Minnesotan. This infuriated Douglas, since Blackmun was perceived by Douglas as then favoring state abortion restriction. (Blackmun had been appointed to the Court by President Nixon about a year earlier]. By mid-January 1972, Blackmun had looked at the cases and found the issue so unclear that he urged the Chief. Justice to ask for re-argument in both Roe and Doe. (Letter from Harry Blackmun to Warren Burger, dated January 18, 1972]."

"The cases were reargued, but only over Justice Douglas' extraordinary and harshly written protest. [An internal Letter from William O. Douglas to Warren Burger, dated June 1, 1972, threatens "[i]f the vote of the Conference is to reargue, then I will file a statement telling what is happening to us and the tragedy it entails." Justice Douglas filed a published written dissent to setting the cases over for reargument]. Perhaps, the key to understanding why the Court, notwithstanding Douglas' protestations, pursued reargument lies with the gentlemanly prodding of new Justice Powell. As mentioned, Powell had recently joined the Court, and he asked politely for reargument, pointing out that "Harry Blackmun, the author of the (draft] opinions, thinks the cases should be carried over and reargued next fall. His position, based on months of study, suggests enough doubt on an issue of large national importance to justify the few months delay." [Memorandum to the Conference from Lewis Powell, dated June 1, 1972]."

"Justice Blackmun writes: "many pregnant women, particularly younger girls, who may refuse to face the fact of pregnancy and who, for one reason or another, do not get around to medical consultation until the end of the first trimester is upon them or, indeed, has passed. [Memorandum to the Conference from Harry Blackmun, dated December 11, 1972]."

"The Court's decision in Roe effectively blocked the state legislative process. In the years between Roe and Casey, few state laws survived the Court's imposed value preference allowing the application of lethal force to be applied against the unborn. In Casey, the Court slightly loosened its grip, and brief waiting periods, informed decisionmaking, minor reporting requirements, and parental consent with judicial by-pass, were tolerated by the Court. It seemed, for one transient moment, that Justice Scalia may have been a bit too pessimistic when he wrote that "Roe's mandate for abortion-on-demand destroyed the compromises of the past, rendered compromise impossible for the future, and required the entire issue to be resolved uniformly, at the national level." 112 S.Ct. at 2882."

"Recall that Donohue and Levitt assume that the abortion ratio is zero in all 45 nonrepeal states in 1972. As noted above this assumption is extreme. Nevertheless, the absolute change in resident abortion rates between 1972 and 1973 in nonrepeal states is correlated with the level of the abortion rate in 1973. The weighted mean abortion rate in 1973 for states below the median is 6.6 abortions per 1,000 women 15 to 44 as compared to 16.0 in states above the median. If there is a “dose-response” effect of abortion on crime, then the effect of Roe v. Wade on arrest and homicide rates should be greater in absolute value for the states with greater abortion rates in the year immediately following Roe. I find no evidence of such an effect."

"Citizens can easily feel disempowered when issues they care about are reduced to analyzing the proclivities of nine people in Washington sitting in black robes. Since 1973, the questions about reproductive rights have been dominated by the court, not Congress. But now we have an opportunity to recalibrate the balance and guarantee reproductive justice for Americans in every state. We don’t need the court to protect these rights. We just need a majority vote in Congress."

"Donohue and Levitt use no data on abortion prior to 1973. Their analysis of arrests by single year of age, for instance, pertains to birth cohorts born between 1961 and 1981 where approximately 60 percent of the state/ age / cohort cells are assigned an abortion ratio of zero. However, demographers have concluded that most legal abortions in the early 1970s replaced illegal abortions (Tietze 1973; Sklar and Berkov 1974). If the underreporting of abortion were random among states, their estimates would be biased downward. As I show below, however, the measurement error is negatively correlated with the true abortion rate in 1972 and thus the direction of the bias is unknown."

"In this sense, Roe is unique — it occupies a role in Senate confirmations unlike any other case. If 50 is good enough to confirm a justice for life and against Roe, it should be good enough to democratically enshrine Roe into law, too. All it takes is 50 senators to sidestep the filibuster (or return it to its original roots, like a speaking filibuster) for this particular piece of legislation. And especially when such legislation is designed to preserve the status quo over reproductive rights and codify five decades of understandings, it is hard to see how senators representing a small fraction of the United States should be able to block the popular will."

"In White's view, the Court had merely substituted its values with respect to the ordering of priorities between mother and unborn child for those of the states, a policy which "should be left with the people and to the political processes the people have devised to govern their affairs. Justice Rehnquist, in an opinion which questioned the plaintiffs' standing, also attacked the sweeping invalidation of all restrictions on abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy. He denied that the right to privacy was involved in these cases and reproached the majority for ignoring the history of the Fourteenth Amendment whose adoption discloses, according to the Justice, no understanding in the minds of the framers that unborn children were not to be regarded as "persons" within its protection."

"[T]he presuppositions of Roe v. Wade are no less religious than those of the German Abortion Case. After all, the value of privacy is squarely rooted in the historical belief in man's spirituality, out of which grew a theory of personal autonomy."

"The German and American Abortion Cases are both products of political regimes in which judicial review plays a central role in the process of government. The enlightened conscience of a future generation may condemn Roe v. Wade in tones that we now reserve for the despised Dred Scott case. Or it may regard Roe v. Wade as an- other step on man's road to freedom. Or men may take a middle position, much like the German Court, and seek a balancing of rights. Whatever the future may hold in this regard, the magnitude of the power that certain constitutional democracies have conferred on their courts of law must be clear to the men of this generation. The reversal of legislative policies as important to society as American state anti-abortion laws and the German Abortion Reform Act is a very serious matter. But the judicial overriding of legislative policy on the ground of constitutionality is apparently one of the prices that citizens within a constitutional regime that confers such authority on its courts are willing to pay."

"Footnote 4 Webster, 109 S. Ct. at 2067 (Blackmun, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) (“The simple truth is that Roe would not survive the plurality's analysis.” And (id. At 3058 (opinion of Rehnquist, C.J.) (“This case . . . affords us no occasion to revisit the holding of Roe . . . and we leave it undisturbed.”) and id. At 3060 (O’Connor, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment) (“there is no necessity to accept the State’s invitation to reexamine the constitutional validity of Roe v. Wade”). Probably the bet summary of Webster’s effect is Justice Scalia’s observation that the decision “preserves a chaos that is evident to anyone who can read and count.” Id. At 3065 (Scalia, J. concurring in part and concurring in the judgment). Since Webster purports to leave it undisturbed, this Article will take the Court at its words and presume that Roe is still good law."

"With reference to internal Supreme Court memoranda relating to the drafting of Roe v. Wade made public by Thurgood Marshall, but to my knowledge, not previously analyzed, it will be illustrated how, by Justice Blackmun's own admission, the holding in Roe is more "arbitrary" preference than constitutional interpretation."

"None of the Justices claim there is a specific textual guarantee of abortion to be found anywhere in the constitutional document. Nor does the abortion claim find legitimacy within the background principles of common law out of which the American Constitution emerged. As Bracton records, and the draft opinions within the internal Marshall papers indicate the Justices knew, abortion has little common law support, and was clearly thought by some to be homicide. [II Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England 341 (Thorne ed. 1968), a citation to which can be found in Justice Blackmun's 4th circulated draft in December 1972]. Because of the more rudimentary nature of science in the 18th and 19th centuries, the common law drew a distinction between abortions before and after quickening [16 to 18 weeks], but under English codification in 1803 both were criminal only in different degrees. When medical science advanced, the quickening distinction receded, and penalties for all abortions increased. In 1868, when the 14th Amendment was adopted, statutory prohibitions or restrictions on abortion were commonplace. Twenty-eight states of the then 37 and 8 territories banned or limited abortion. [J. Mohr, Abortion in America at 200 (1978)]. The Court's drafts also reveal that the decision was not being guided by ancient precepts of medical ethics. In this respect, the Hippocratic Oath dating back three to four hundred years before Christ, had doctors pledging that they "will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner . . . not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion." [The 4th circulated draft of Justice Blackmun's opinion in Roe cites the Hippocratic Oath, but cavalierly dismisses it on the basis of academic writing that found it to be held as true only within Pythagorean Greek culture. Why the Pythagoreans should be so ill-treated, or deemed uninfluential, is not explained. Indeed the Oath, which coincides with prevalent Christian belief since the end of antiquity, became the "nucleus" of medical ethics.]"

"Douglas steadfastly resisted reargument. Matters dragged on nonetheless and by mid-May, 1972, Justice Blackmun tried to rid the Court of the issue on procedural grounds -- namely, that the Texas statute was too vague to be enforced. He wrote: "I think that [vagueness] would be all that is necessary for disposition of the case, and that we need not get into the more complex Ninth Amendment issue." [Memorandum to Conference from Harry Blackmun, dated May 18, 1972]. This did not suit Justice Douglas, who argued that there were at least 4 votes [enough for a majority on an understaffed Court] that "an abortion [may] be performed by a licensed physician within a limited time after conception." (Letter from William O. Douglas to Harry Blackmun, dated May 19, 1972]. Douglas must have talked with Justice Brennan, because at about the same time Brennan by letter gives his support for the abortion proposition in almost identical language; namely, that "an abortion be performed by a licensed physician within some limited time after conception." [Letter from William Brennan to Harry Blackmun, dated May 18, 19721. Several things are striking about this internal correspondence beyond, of course, Justice Blackmun's change of posture from assigned draftsman to abortion advocate and the overall bewilderment of the Court after the case was first argued. First, there was considerable internal pressure to get a decision, perhaps before new members of the Court might change the outcome. [Nixon appointees' Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist replaced Black and Harlan; as it later turned out, Powell and Rehnquist split over the issue]. Douglas, in particular, seemed especially agitated to push the opinions out, writing "I feel very strongly that [Roe and Doe] should not be reargued. . . I hope the 5 can agree to get the cases down this Term, so that we can spend our energies next Term on other matters." [Letter from William O. Douglas to Harry Blackmun, dated May 31, 1972]. Second, the internal correspondence is almost completely devoid of what one could call constitutional argument. Instead of a careful examination of the common law or argumentation premised upon the textual provisions of the Constitutional document, there is merely vote counting and assertion. Third, taking Justices Douglas and Brennan at their word, the initial 4-person majority envisioned only a very narrowly-worded abortion privilege -- one that would be confined to a limited time after conception. The last point is particularly striking in light of President Clinton's insupportable claim and recent veto that the abortion license formulated by the Court extends even to the most graphically hideous procedure and to the moment of birth."

"By late May, Justice Blackmun had fully joined the Douglas-Brennan circle [which also included Potter Stewart and Thurgood Marshall] in favor of creating an abortion right. [Memorandum to the Conference, dated May 31, 1972]. Justice Blackmun's memoranda reflect highly legislative considerations almost exclusively. For example, he proposes to invalidate most of the Georgia statute, except maybe those requiring an abortion to occur in a licensed and accredited hospital. [Memorandum to the Conference from Harry Blackmun, dated May 25, 1972]. Demonstrating that none of these specific invalidations were rooted in constitutional text or history, however, Justice Blackmun holds open the possibility, like a good legislative lobbyist, that may be "some of you may wish to take that step, too [that is, allowing abortions outside hospitals]." [Id., the Court did take that step.] The particulars of the Court's legislative considerations still tangled, Justice Blackmun, at month's end, urges that Roe and Doe be reargued. [Memorandum to Conference from Harry Blackmun, dated May 31, 1972]."

"In November, Harry Blackmun writes the final drafts of opinions that today we know rather infamously as Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) and Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179 (1973). Again, no real discussion of law occurs in the internal deliberations; instead, there is the startling admission from Justice Blackmun in the presentation of his near final draft that "you will observe that I have concluded that the end of the first trimester is critical. This is arbitrary, but perhaps any other selected point, such as quickening or viability, is equally arbitrary." [Memorandum to Conference from Harry Blackmun, dated November 21, 1972, emphasis added]. So, there you have it. A confession by the principal author of the most infamous decision in this century, and perhaps after Dred Scott, ever, revealing that arbitrary choice -- not discernment of the law of the land -- accounts for the result in Roe. Law, legal history, constitutional allocations of power, all ignored. The abortion right derives not from background principles of common law; not in the first principles of our constitutional republic; not as a result of careful parsing of constitutional text."

"Between late November and the end of the year, Blackmun observes how he's thinking about moving what he called previously the "critical" line from the end of the first trimester to viability. He admits that he chose the end of the first trimester largely for marketing reasons, writing: "I selected the earlier point because I felt that it would be more easily accepted (by us as well as others) . . ." [Memorandum to the Conference from Harry Blackmun, dated December 11, 1972]. He is hesitant, however, if moving the line would cost him votes on the merits. ["I would be willing to recast the opinions at the later date (viability instead of the end of the first trimester), but I do not wish to do so if it would alienate any Justice who has expressed to me, either by writing or orally, that he is in general agreement, on the merits, with the circulated memorandum." [Id.]"

"A few of the justices were squeamish. Justice Potter Stewart wondered "about the desirability of the dicta being quite so inflexibly 'legislative,' suggesting that he might extend to the States more latitude to make policy judgments." [Letter from Potter Stewart to Harry Blackmun, dated December 14, 1972]. The flexibility was not to be, though Justice Blackmun in a small concession urged that the "cases . . . come down no later than the week of January 15 to tie in with the convening of most state legislatures." [Memorandum to Conference from Harry Blackmun, dated December 15, 1972]. A professional courtesy perhaps to fellow legislators. Of course, a Court that engages in practices well beyond its Article III function to decide "cases or controversies" under the principles and usages of established law, needs its own press office to put, as political figures say today, the proper "spin" on matters. Writing that he anticipated the headlines that will be produced over the country when the abortion decisions are announced," Justice Blackmun prepared an 8-page press release personally. [Memorandum to the Conference, with press attachment, from Harry Blackmun, dated January 16, 1973]."

"It was, after all, Justice Blackmun, himself, in Casey, who echoed the sentiment of the plurality that "a decision to overrule Roe 'would seriously weaken the Court's capacity to exercise the judicial power and to function as the Supreme Court of a Nation dedicated to a rule of law." 112 S.Ct. at 2845. In truly Orwellian terms, Justice Blackmun then scowled at the four dissenting justices, with the comment: "What has happened today should serve as a model for future Justices and a warning to all who have tried to turn this Court into yet another political branch. Id. This is a skeptical age and for those more generally inclined to be distrustful of public figures and events than myself the history recounted here may not impart the same level of surprise, as it disappointingly conveys to me. In light of these revelations, however, I now better understand Chief Justice Rehnquist's strong criticism of Justice Blackmun for "mak[ing] . . . decisions (in the abortion context] with a view toward speculative public perceptions," Casey, 112 S.Ct. at 2866 (Rehnquist, C.J., dissenting. Possibly, the Chief Justice merely was recalling from internal memoranda that Roe was constructed largely upon personal preferences and an accompanying press release. This may also explain why Justice Scalia, who was not on the Court when Roe was decided, could plaintively wonder in dissent in Casey why the Court skirted the fundamental question of "how wrong was the decision on its face?" 112 S. Ct. at 2875."

"Donohue and Levitt (2003) argue that tests of abortion and total crime are weak between 1985 and 1990 because a relatively small proportion of all criminals were exposed to legalized abortion before 1990. As evidence, they point to their relatively low effective abortion ratio over this period. However, the low figure results from their inappropriate assumption that there were no abortions prior to 1973 in the 45 nonrepeal states. Early surveillance by the CDC found that there were 175,508 reported abortions in 1970, 480,259 in 1971, and 586,760 in 1972 in the United States (Centers for Disease Control 1971, 1972, 1973). Moreover, the resident abortion ratio in the repeal states: Alaska, California, Washington D.C., Hawaii, New York, and Washington, was 340 in 1971 and 370 in 1972 (Author’s calculations based on data from CDC (1972, Table 4) and CDC (1974, Table 5). According to CDC data, the abortion ratio for the entire US peaked in 1981 at 358 (Koonin et al. 1997). In other words, cohorts born in repeal states between 1971 and 1973 were exposed to a level of abortion that exceeded the maximum average exposure for the entire country at any time since abortion became legal."

"The likelihood that Roe is overturned in the near future is remote. Nevertheless, states have imposed new requirements of abortion providers that, if enforced, will increase the distance women have to travel to access services."

"The conclusion that Roe had a relatively modest impact on birth rates is somewhat at odds with previous work (Gruber, Levine and Staiger 1999; Levine et al. 1999; Levine 2004). These authors argued that national legalization in 1973 led to an equally large decrease in birth rates in the non-repeal states as had occurred in the repeal states in the previous three years. Gruber, Levine and Staiger (1999) refer to this as the “bounce back” effect of Roe. However, they lack a comparison group after 1973. Consequently, they cannot distinguish the “bounce back” effect from a relatively larger decrease in birth rates in the repeal states relative to the non-repeal states in the pre-Roe years followed by no meaningful effect of Roe in the subsequent years.19 Although the latter seems surprising given the dramatic change in distance to the nearest abortion provider between 1972 and 1973 (Figure 7), trends in birth rates are consistent with this interpretation."

"Demographers estimate that approximately two-thirds of all legal abortions replaced illegal ones in the first year after legalization. Estimates are based on the change in births between 1970 and 1971 compared to the number of reported abortions in 1971 (Sklar and Berkov 1974; Tietze 1973). As noted above, Donohue and Levitt have no data on abortion for cohorts born before 1974 and thus assume a zero abortion ratio for more than half their observations. A facile argument is to assume that any error is likely random and estimates are biased downward. But this assumption is decisively contradicted by the data. As a simple example, Kansas had an abortion ratio of 414 per 1,000 live births in 1973. Donohue and Levitt assume the abortion ratio in Kansas is zero in 1972. However, data collected by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) (Centers for Disease Control 1974) indicate that Kansas had an observed abortion ratio of 369 per 1,000 live births in 1972! Going further, I estimated the resident abortion rate in 1972 using published CDC data and the algorithm used by AGI for assigning abortions by state of residence in 1973. The correlation between resident abortion rates or ratios in 1972 and 1973 is 0.95. In other words, states with the greatest abortion ratios in 1973 had the greatest abortion ratios in 1972. By assuming the abortion ratio was zero in the 45 nonrepeal states and Washington, D.C., Donohue and Levitt build in an error that is negatively correlated with the true abortion rate. As a result, the direction of the bias is unknown."

"Because the exposure group includes individuals 20 and 21 years of age, instead of 18 and 19 as in Figure 3, the pre-Roe period is now 1992– 93 and the post-Roe or exposure period is 1995 and 1996. Again, with the exception of property crime, the pre-Roe levels and trends in arrest and homicide rates are similar. Moreover, there is little to suggest that arrests or homicide rates fell differentially for 20- and 21-year-olds relative to 23- and 24-year-olds before and after exposure to legalized abortion."

"Given Figures 4 and 5, it is not surprising that I find that exposure to legalized abortion following Roe v. Wade has no effect on arrest or homicide rates of the two exposed groups. Consider arrest rates for violent crime in Panel A. The estimated coefficient, 0.064, indicates that violent crime arrests rose 6.4 percent more among teens 18 to 19 years of age relative to 21- and 22-year-olds. The remaining DDs indicate that Roe had a statistically insignificant and qualitatively unimportant impact on arrest and homicide rates."

"In closing, however, it would be useful to pull back from issues of measurement and identification and ask more generally why a cohort effect associated with legalized abortion was not more evident in the data. I have two explanations. First, the actual number of unintended births averted, although signicant, was an order of magnitude less than the number of reported legal abortions in the early 1970s. Many analysts, including Donohue and Levitt treat reported abortions as an appropriate counterfactual for unintended childbearing. I have questioned this strategy because the availability of legal abortion may figure into decisions regarding sex and contraception, which weakens the link between abortion and fertility. Second, analysts, I being one, have tended to overestimate the selection effects associated with abortion. A careful examination of studies of pregnancy resolution reveals that women who abort are at lower risk of having children with criminal propensities than women of similar age, race and marital status who instead carried to term. For instance, in an early study of teens in Ventura County, California between 1972 and 1974, researchers demonstrated that pregnant teens with better grades, more completed schooling, and not on public assistance were much more likely to abort than their poorer, less academically oriented counterparts (Leibowitz, Eisen, and Chow 1986). Studies based on data from the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) make the same point (Michael 2000; Hotz, McElroy, and Sanders 1999). Indeed, Hotz, McElroy, and Sanders (1999) found that teens who abort are similar along observed characteristics to teens that were never pregnant, both of whom differ significantly from pregnant teens that spontaneously abort or carry to term. Nor is favorable selection limited to teens. Unmarried women that abort have more completed schooling and higher AFQT scores than their counterparts that carry the pregnancy to term (Powell-Griner and Trent 1987; Currie, Nixon, and Cole 1995). In sum, legalized abortion has improved the lives of many women by allowing them to avoid an unwanted birth. I found little evidence to suggest, however, that the legalization of abortion had an appreciable effect on the criminality of subsequent cohorts."

"The Supreme Court’s recent decision to accept a major abortion case out of Mississippi has led to fear among many Americans that Roe v. Wade will be overruled next year. There is some chance of this — but that’s why it is crucial to understand that reproductive rights do not depend only on the justices. Here’s the thing: Congress can, right now, by simple majority vote, protect those rights and nullify any threat posed by the Mississippi case or any other. A year ago, when the last abortion case reached the high court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. cast the deciding vote to invalidate Louisiana’s abortion restrictions. Roberts surprised many by joining the four justices appointed to the court by Democratic presidents, one of whom was Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Today, however, Justice Amy Coney Barrett occupies the seat Ginsburg once did, leading some who support abortion rights to predict doom from the Mississippi case. Predictions are always tough in this business, but the far more important point is that this focus on the Supreme Court is misplaced. Reproductive rights need not depend at all on what the court does with Roe."

"[T]he Court remarked in Wade that litigation involving pregnancy, Which is "capable of repetition" is an exception to the federal rule that an actual controversy must exist at the time a case is decided on appeal. In Bolton the Court held that even licensed physicians consulted by pregnant women have standing to sue because they are within reach of the law's criminal provisions. These physicians "should not be required to await and undergo a criminal prosecution as the sole means of seeking relief, asserted the Court. Thus, the abortion cases were capable of judicial resolution. Some of the Court's critics have noted that this apparent stretching of the standing rule is the result of significant enlargement of the Court's own perception of its institutional role. They would probably agree with Richard A. Epstein's assertion that "the Supreme Court today views constitutional litigation as a means of settling great conflicts of the social order." On the other hand, as Tocqueville once reminded us, all great political conflicts in America tend eventually to resolve themselves into constitutional questions. Failing to achieve their objectives by political means, proponents of liberalized abortion laws naturally gravitated to the judiciary, seeking victory on more favorable terrain. For purposes of this analysis, however, it is not the victory that is important, but rather the Court's own capacity to persuade a reasonably open mind of the validity and propriety of its ultimate ruling."

"There are several interesting steps in the Supreme Court's argument in Wade and Bolton. Speaking through Mr. Justice Blackmun, the Court first explored the historical origin of American state abortion laws. Its rather detailed excursion through history includes a description of abortion policy as reflected in Greek and Roman Law, the Hippocratic Oath, Common Law, English statutory law, and American law, followed by an analysis of the evolving policy and current attitudes of the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, and the American Bar Association. Without indicating precisely the relevance of its historical overview to the doctrinal point made later in the opinion, the Court then hastens into a discussion of the reasons justifying American criminal abortion statutes; after noting that most were passed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Court concludes that they were intended mainly for the purpose of protecting the woman from a dangerous medical procedure as well as for the purpose of preserving prenatal life."

"Three justices concurred in the majority opinion. Chief Justice Burger, displeased with the dissenting Justices' wide interpretation of the majority opinion, rejected the contention that the rule in the cases permits abortion on demand. Justice Douglas, hedging against a too-narrow interpretation of the rule and meeting Justice White's argument about the ordering of priorities between fetus and mother, found Georgia's statute constitutionally defective precisely "because it equates the value of embryonic life immediately after conception with the worth of life immediately before birth" and because the statute fails to include the psychological as well as the physical "health" of the woman as a permissible reason for the right of a woman to interrupt her pregnancy prior to viability. In Douglas' view, the right of a woman to procure an abortion was well within the marital privacy cases on contraception. The concurring opinion of Justice Stewart was a reluctant acceptance-a capitulation following his long resistance, beginning with the Connecticut Birth Control Case, to the doctrine of substantive due process-of the prevailing view that social policy is now subject to judicial review on substantive grounds. Rather than scouring the Constitution's hidden recesses for a nonexistent right of personal privacy, he squarely held on the basis of his reading of the precedents that the right of a woman to procure an abortion is part of the "liberty" protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment."

"Let us restate the main constitutional rulings and principles of the German and American abortion cases. The American case holds that the right to privacy, founded upon the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. A zone of privacy is created within which the decision to procure an abortion is exclusively that of the pregnant woman and her physician. Accordingly, the state has no legitimate interest whatever in preventing abortions from occurring within the first trimester of pregnancy. Its only interest is seeing to it that abortions are performed under circumstances that insure adequate surgical procedures and care for patients. Yet the right to procure an abortion is not absolute, and so, following the first trimester of pregnancy, the state may begin to assert important interests in maintaining medical standards. It may assert these interests because an abortion performed in the second trimester is a greater medical risk than one performed in the first trimester. It is only in the last trimester, when the fetus becomes viable and potentially able to survive outside of the womb, that the state may promote its interest in protecting future life, but even during this period the unborn child may be destroyed, medical standards permitting, to preserve the life or health of the mother. What we have here is a constitutional policy on abortion based on the Court's conclusion that a fetus or unborn child is not a "person" within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment."

"In a pluralistic society composed of a multitude of belief systems, the Court seems intent on keeping certain issues-those likely to be religiously or theologically divisive-out of the forum of effective public discussion. By not allowing the abortion question to be legislatively determined, the Court has effectively "depoliticized" the issue. If the people's representatives are incapable of acting on an issue after its exhaustion by discussion, it makes no sense, politically, to talk about it. Lemon v. Kurtzman, where the Court invalidated a Pennsylvania statute reimbursing church-related schools for costs of teachers salaries and textbooks in specific secular subjects, is an even clearer illustration of the Court's attempt to "depoliticize" a public issue and, incidentally-to return to the anti-communitarian theme-to erode the significance of religion as an intermediating agency between the individual and mass society. Remarked Chief Justice Burger: "Ordinarily political debate and division, however vigorous or even partisan, are normal and healthy manifestations of our democratic system of government, but political division along religious lines was one of the principal evils against which the First Amendment was intended to protect. The potential divisiveness of such conflict is a threat to the normal political process." Thus is social peace achieved. This analysis is a rather circumspect way of saying that the result in Roe v. Wade not only conforms to the individualistic ethic at the heart of the conventional "Madisonian" interpretation of American constitutionalism, but is also understandable in the light of the pluralistic nature of American society."

"Measured by any logical test that we would wish to apply, the constitutional reasoning in the German Case is more tightly argued and more analytically precise than the argument advanced in Roe v. Wade. The German opinion is carefully crafted and composed in measured language, leaving little room for doubt or ambiguity with regard to its meaning. On the other hand, the privacy argument in Roe v. Wade is confusing and even contradictory. In the end, the American decision does not lend itself to a clear and unambiguous interpretation. Justice Douglas was even impelled to write a concurring opinion to hedge against a too narrow interpretation of the Court's opinion, studiously avoiding, for example, any reference to "potential life," a concept that Blackmun introduced as a limitation of privacy. Chief Justice Burger, on the other hand, concurred in what amounted to a near dissent by warning against a too broad interpretation of the opinion and by deploring Blackmun's use of current medical knowledge in support of the opinion. Of course, eroded logic is one of the costs of the high value that the justices as well as Americans generally place on the practice of individualized opinion writing on the Supreme Court. In Germany, such personalized expressions of opinion remain a clear exception to the rule. The law-certainly the highest law of the land-ideally speaks with one voice in Germany's legal culture, underscoring both the authority and the unity of the law."

"Roe v. Wade is an unpersuasive opinion, and the root of its unpersuasiveness is the Supreme Court’s failure to ground its decision, that abortion is a fundamental right, in the text of the Constitution. Because the Court ignored its “obligation to trace it premises to the charter from which it derives its authority” commentators have felt entitled to conclude that a woman’s right to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term “is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure.” Some have concluded that the decision is so completely devoid of any foundation in the Constitution that it ought to be overruled, and the authority to ban or permit abortion returned to the states."

"Even many of Roe’s friends want to rewrite it, but so far no attempt to do so has been wholly successful. Those who have followed the Court’s lead by emphasizing the exceedingly personal nature of the woman’s decision have had as little success at locating her privacy in the text of the Constitution as the Court itself did. Philip Bobbitt’s proposed principle, tat “[g]overnment may not coerce intimate acts,” is appealing, but it appears nowhere in the document. Hermann and Barzelay’s defense of Roe, which has been called “the principal scholarly defense of that opinion,” largely concedes the critics’ point by relying heavily on the thesis (not explicitly adopted by Roe itself) that constitutional law need not bear any direct relationship to the text of the Constitution. Many lawyers and judges endorse that thesis, but it is dangerous for a defense of abortion to rely upon it exclusively, given the increasingly influential view that “[t]he Court is most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or design of the Constitution.” Moreover, the privacy argument has internal tensions, because “[t]he pregnant woman cannot be isolated in her privacy.” Unlike the liberties protected in the other privacy cases, abortion is arguably not private at all, because “the termination of a pregnancy typically involves the destruction of another entity: the fetus.” A privacy-based defense of abortion seems to depend on the premise that the woman’s choice affects only herself-in other words, that the fetus is not a person. And this premise is, of course, impossible to prove."

"[A] law forbidding abortion cannot be sustained if the state is unable to carry the burden of persuading the court that a fetus is, or should be considered to be, a person.154 While its opinion has many weaknesses, the Roe Court was surely correct to conclude that this burden had not been met."

"The right to abortion has become taken for granted by many. Whatever the deficiencies of Roe’s original reasoning, “millions of women, and their families, have ordered their lives around the right to reproductive choice, and . . . this right has become vital to the full participation of women in the economic and political walks of American life” An upheaval in the nation’s fundamental law requires a more compelling justification than the bald fact that were the present personnel of the Court writing on a blank slate, they would construct the law differently. The point of adhering to precedent is that the public deserves protection from such precipitous judicial revolutions; that is why before the ordinary rule of “stare decisis” is rejected, “the unconstitutionality of the course pursued” should be “made clear.” Because such clarity is simply unavailable in the abortion controversy, Roe should remain the law."

"Despite the Supreme Court's putative "reaffirmation" of part of Roe in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, these opinions remain highly contentious because the constitutional premises upon which they rest are so wholly erroneous as to be non-existent in law. The writer Santyana enjoins us to learn from history."

"In a recent and controversial article, Donohue and Levitt (2001) pre- sent evidence that the legalization of abortion in 1973 explains over half of the recent decline in crime across the United States. A 50 percent increase in the mean abortion ratio is associated with an 11 percent decrease in violent crime, an 8 percent decrease in property crime and a 12 percent decrease in murder. These effects are generally larger and more precisely estimated than the effects of incarceration and police man-power. Moreover, they conclude that the full impact on crime of Roe v. Wade will not be felt for another 20 years. To quote, “Our results suggest that all else equal, legalized abortion will account for persistent declines of 1 percent a year in crime over the next two decades” (p. 415). Given the social costs associated with crime and the controversy surrounding abortion, a causal link between abortion and crime has profound implications for social policy."