"37. According to polls, most Americans held views that aligned with Roe v Wade at the time it was decided: ‘64 percent of American believed that abortion should be a personal decision to be made by a woman and her physician’ (Faux 304). Nonetheless, opponents of the decision tried to reverse Roe v Wade with congressional legislation (Emerson 129–30), with a constitutional amendment (Faux 318), and with litigation before the → Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) (Baby Boy Case 18(h), 30–31). All of these efforts failed. 38. More limited efforts to cabin the effects of Roe v Wade proved successful, however. In 1976, Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, which barred federal Medicaid funds for abortion and thereby made abortion inaccessible for many poor women, at least in those states without state funds for such purposes. A narrowly divided Supreme Court upheld the law in Harris v McRae. Opponents of abortion also advanced other laws that impeded access to abortion to varying degrees (Thornburgh v American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists 759), noting that such laws will ‘often shut down clinics’ (Biskupic). Roe v Wade itself signaled that some of these efforts might be permissible by acknowledging the state’s interest in maternal health (Roe v Wade 165), although Doe v Bolton suggested real limits. These efforts caused courts to be ‘drawn further and further into an array of subsidiary technical questions regarding abortion’ (Wilkinson 276). As of 2009, the Supreme Court had decided ‘more than twenty-five cases involving abortion’ (ibid)."
January 1, 1970