[Mb-civic] Is Roe v. Wade already collapsing? - Ellen Goodman - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Is Roe v. Wade already collapsing?

By Ellen Goodman  |  January 13, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

SIOUX FALLS, S.D.
TO KNOW what's at stake in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings, it's 
best to travel 1,200 miles west from the paneled Senate room to a small 
nondescript clinic in a Great Plains state.

It's best to turn from the blue-and-white charts brandished by senators 
to the parking lot filled with cars from places as far away as Rapid 
City or even Wyoming. It's best to turn from the buzz about precedents 
and privacy to the quiet of a waiting room.

Here, late in the afternoon, the clinic is still full. There's a soldier 
who will make a 700-mile round trip from the western part of the state. 
There's a teenager slouching beside a tense mother. There's a rancher, a 
mother of two high-schoolers and pregnant after having an IUD removed.

This is the only clinic in the state and this is the only day in the 
week when a woman can get an abortion in South Dakota. Today, they'll be 
treated by one of four doctors flown in from Minneapolis because it's 
impossible to recruit locally. Today's doctor is Miriam McCreary, a 
mother of four and grandmother of nine, who graduated from medical 
school in 1958. At 70, she still knows ''how desperate women are to end 
their pregnancies."

One clinic, one day, one doctor. This is what it's like in South Dakota 
right now under Roe v. Wade. It's also like this in North Dakota and 
Mississippi, and not very different in Arkansas or a dozen other states.

Antiabortion lobbyists here boast that South Dakota is the legislative 
laboratory for testing and imposing state restrictions. Last year, five 
new restrictions passed, including one, now being challenged, to force 
doctors to recite a state-written speech saying that abortion ends the 
life of ''a whole, separate, unique living human being." This year, the 
Legislature, which just opened its 35-day session, is being pressed by a 
state task force to add more mis-informed consent, more delays, more 
expensive barriers.

It goes without saying that South Dakota is one of seven states with a 
''trigger law" ready to ban abortion if Roe is overturned. But something 
else requires saying: It's possible to add so many burdens onto the back 
of Roe that it collapses without ever being overturned.

Kate Looby, the thoughtful and energetic state director for Planned 
Parenthood, puts it simply: Even if Roe is saved, ''we'll end up living 
in a country in which women theoretically have legalized, safe abortion. 
But for the women of South Dakota, that won't mean anything." She has 
had to imagine moving this last clinic over to Minnesota.

Here then is the lens through which to watch the Alito hearings. Back in 
D.C., supporters create charts that compare Samuel A. Alito Jr. to 
Sandra Day O'Connor, ''Model Justice." If O'Connor was a moderate, they 
protest smugly, so is Alito.

Indeed, O'Connor's decision in Casey v. Planned Parenthood ruled that 
states can regulate abortion as long as they don't impose an ''undue 
burden" on the right. In South Dakota, says Looby ruefully, ''the 
Legislature has never met a burden it didn't like." Has Alito?

Twenty years ago, Alito believed that the Constitution doesn't protect 
abortion rights. He doesn't disavow that. He laid out a strategy on how 
to eat away at abortion without a frontal assault on Roe. It was a 
blueprint pro-lifers have followed, one regulation at a time. Later, as 
a judge he said the state could order a woman to notify her husband 
before she could get an abortion. O'Connor strongly disagreed.

That moderate ''model justice" Alito would replace also wrote this: 
''the ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social 
life of the nation has been facilitated by their ability to control 
their reproductive lives." Does Alito agree?

More than 30 million women in America have had abortions since Roe. 
Seventy percent of Americans say Alito shouldn't be confirmed if he 
would end Roe. In the hearings, even prolife senators insist, ironically 
and disingenuously, that Alito has an ''open mind."

But the question is not just whether he'll overturn Roe. It's whether 
he'd let it be crushed. In 10 years, more than 400 state regulations 
have been added and more are coming. When do burdens that force women to 
state-shop for their rights become ''undue"?

Today, at the only clinic in South Dakota, the rancher doesn't know much 
about Alito but believes abortion ''shouldn't be up to anyone but the 
woman." Tomorrow, Dr. McCreary will fly back to Minneapolis. Kate Looby 
will drive up to Pierre to fight the next set of regulations.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, Samuel Alito Jr. sits before a committee, 
and stolidly, doggedly, rejects one vastly overdue burden: telling us 
what he believes.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/13/is_roe_v_wade_already_collapsing/
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