Whittling Away Abortion Rights

Read between the lines of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Thursday banning mere whisper of the word abortion at federally funded family planning clinics. Knowledge is dangerous, says the high court. Do the justices fear that some poor, pregnant woman who learns about abortion might choose to have one? No matter that all women still have a constitutional right to abortion. The court says it’s against “public interest” for a poor woman to even be told about abortion if she’s at a federally funded clinic.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, writing for the slim 5-4 majority, upheld regulations issued in 1988 forbiding discussion of abortion in clinics funded through the federal government. The family planning program funds about 4,000 clinics serving more than 4 million low-income women each year. The clinics have always been banned from using federal money to perform abortions. But until 1988, clinic staffs could tell women about all options, including abortion, and make referrals. In 1988 the Reagan Administration clamped a lid on all such information. Court challenges kept the the ban from being enforced virtually everywhere. Not any more.

Now, when a woman specifically asks about abortion, the clinic can only say it does not consider abortion an appropriate method of family planning. And the clinics will only refer patients to physicians who do not perform abortions. Rehnquist said this is not “a case of the Government ‘suppressing a dangerous idea’ but of a prohibition on a project grantee . . . from engaging in activities outside of its scope.”

More troubling is Rehnquist’s facile argument: “The doctor-patient relationship established by the (federal) program . . . does not justify an expectation on the part of the patient of comprehensive medical advice.” Is the court condoning a dual standard: full medical information for those who can pay but only court-approved medical information for those who can’t?

This cruel ruling is part of a slow erosion of the federal right to a legal abortion. The court is signaling that while it has not yet been willing to reverse the Roe vs. Wade ruling that made abortion legal, it is more than willing to whittle away at it.