How About Rights for the Born?

Last year, about 4,000 Utah women who discovered they were pregnant didn’t want to be. Last year, those 4,000 women were able to get a legal abortion in Utah. In three months, however, all but a few Utah women will have no choice but to continue a pregnancy that they didn’t plan and to bear a child they don’t want.

That’s because Utah has joined a growing number of states doggedly trying to stamp out virtually all elective abortions. Last week Gov. Norman H. Bangerter signed a bill outlawing all abortions except in cases of reported rape or incest, where it is necessary to save the mother’s life or when the fetus is determined to have unspecified “grave . . . defects.”

In one of many paradoxes that now characterize the politics of abortion in this country, the Utah politicians who begat this bill displayed the highest regard for the “rights” of the fetus while undermining the rights of women and men to participate in the legislative process: Notices of hearings were posted at the eleventh hour, early copies of the bill were unavailable and speakers who opposed the legislation were cut short.

Another paradox is the emerging national patchwork of abortion laws. Pennsylvania and Guam have passed legislation severely restricting abortion, while similar legislation has failed in other states. This situation will not sustain its own contradictions: Abortion is either a fundamental right, which states are therefore precluded from abridging, or it isn’t. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court in its unwise 1989 Webster decision invited precisely this sort of state-by-state division.

Civil libertarian groups will try to block implementation of Utah’s new law in the courts. They should prevail in their challenge, as they have so far in Pennsylvania and Guam.

If they fail, Utah women who want an abortion will have to take to the road as the snow melts this spring and head for more hospitable legislative climates in Nevada, Wyoming or Colorado.

And rest assured, women who can afford it will do so, the efforts of Utah’s legislature notwithstanding. The tragedy is that many women who can’t afford it will not have that freedom.