Administration Asks Court to Overturn Abortion Right

The Bush Administration on Monday urged the Supreme Court to use a pending Pennsylvania case to disavow the court’s 1973 Roe vs. Wade ruling, which guarantees a woman’s right to legal abortion, and to adopt a standard that would permit states to outlaw nearly all abortions.

“Roe vs. Wade was wrongly decided and should be overruled,” Solicitor General Kenneth W. Starr said in his brief to the court. “In our view, a state’s interest in protecting fetal life throughout pregnancy, as a general matter, outweighs a woman’s liberty interest in an abortion.”

By coincidence, the brief was filed the day after more than 500,000 demonstrators marched in Washington to demand that the constitutional right to abortion be preserved. Monday was the deadline set by the court for the filing of legal briefs on the side of Pennsylvania in the upcoming case.

The Administration’s stand came as no surprise. Soon after taking office in 1989, lawyers for the Bush Administration urged the court to overrule Roe vs. Wade in a pending Missouri case.

The justices could not agree on a single legal standard for measuring abortion restrictions in the Missouri case. Four justices expressed willingness to throw out the abortion right entirely, but Justice Sandra Day O’Connor adopted a more moderate position.

The issue is now back before the court in the Pennsylvania case (Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, 91-744).

In contrast to the Administration’s position, Pennsylvania Atty. Gen. Ernest Preate Jr. urged the justices Monday to uphold his state’s law on relatively narrow grounds. The 1989 measure would require that a woman notify her doctor and her spouse and then wait 24 hours before ending a pregnancy. Even if those state regulations were upheld, abortion would remain legal in Pennsylvania.

Starr, the Administration’s top courtroom lawyer, asked the justices to adopt a legal framework that would uphold virtually any restriction on abortion except one that would require a woman to carry a pregnancy that endangered her life.

Arguments in the Pennsylvania case will be heard April 22; a ruling is expected by late June.