More Tumult on Abortion Issue

When an indecisive U.S. Supreme Court ruling last summer allowed more restrictions on abortion on a state-by-state basis, it invited chaos. That’s precisely what we now have--a crazy-quilt, pell-mell system that promises only to become even crazier. Idaho provides the latest disturbing example of the tumult the Supreme Court has wrought.

The Idaho Legislature last week passed a bill that allows abortion only in the most limited of circumstances: rape, incest, serious fetal defect or a physical health threat to the pregnant woman. Rape victims would have to report the crime to police within seven days and incest victims would have to be under age 18 and would have to first report the crime to police. These restrictions are so burdensome that they are certain to invite lower court scrutiny. But the most cynical element of the Idaho measure is its attempt to play directly to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

O’Connor, considered the high court’s swing vote on abortion, has indicated that she believes that abortion restrictions should not make a woman who has an abortion criminally liable. So anti-abortion zealots tailored legislation that addresses precisely that point, with the stated hope that the legislation winds up before Justice O’Connor. The Idaho bill found a new scapegoat by shifting the primary legal burden to doctors who perform abortions disallowed by the law. They could face civil fines of up to $10,000, among other penalties.

In last summer’s Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services case, O’Connor suggested that the court’s protection of legal abortion could be swept away under the right circumstances. As the Idaho Legislature has most recently demonstrated, there are those who are willing to distort the law and basic tenets of privacy and fairness in order to hand her the right circumstances. The high court is getting the chaos it invited. In the process the nation is building up emotional scar tissue that will be with us for years to come.