Women Carry a Burden on Top of Burden

Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a mother of three, is burdened by her sex. All women are. Some of this is physiological--only we can give birth--but most of the burden is prescribed by man.

Man might not see woman’s burden in the same way. There are reasons, he might say, to work us more and pay us less. “Women’s work” is deemed less worthy than his own.

And some of man’s work is still off-limits to womankind. No women priests. No women in combat. No woman President of the USA. The timing is said to be “not right.”

“Biology,” man might call woman’s burden, or “hormones,” or the more far-reaching “just the way things are.” If he is feeling chivalrous, man will call us “the fair sex.” If he is not, he will simply call us “weak.”

I have been struck by some of the male reactions to the Navy’s Tailhook scandal, where 26 women, half of them naval officers, were sexually assaulted while being forced to run a gantlet of male Top Guns.

“They should have known better than to come to the third floor,” one flyboy said on TV. “If they can’t take it, they should get out,” another opined.

Such sentiment is nothing new, of course. Its echoes are hard to escape. Still, women often pretend not to hear; we like to get along and “get ahead’ in man’s world.

Yet some of our smiles are growing very tight.

So I suppose you could call it progress that Justice O’Connor now appears concerned that woman’s burden not become “undue.” She wrote about this in ruling that American women still have a constitutional right to decide for themselves whether they will have an abortion or give birth.

“The liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition and so unique to the law,” she said.

She went on to talk about pregnancy and childbirth--”pain that only she must bear”--and how women traditionally have endured these sacrifices to the approval of society and certainly, her child.

“(But) her suffering is too intimate and personal for the state to insist, without more, upon its own vision of the woman’s role, however dominant that vision has been in the course of our history and our culture,” the justice said.

“The destiny of the woman must be shaped to a large extent on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society.”

In other words, a woman should decide for herself how to lead her life. The choice to give birth is still her own. Yet the justices followed this with a series of “buts.” This is where the five-member majority signed off on Justice O’Connor’s murky standard of what a woman’s burden should be.

The court said, in essence, that it would know an undue burden if it saw one. We lay people were offered only hints as to how such a monster might look. The section of a Pennsylvania law requiring a woman to get her husband’s permission before an abortion was the only one struck down.

A 24-hour waiting period for an abortion: a reasonable burden, the court found. Teen-agers required to get permission from their parents or a judge: reasonable too. State mandated lectures on fetal development: ditto here.

This was a compromise, it appears. It has angered absolutists on either side and confused those in the vast middle ground.

Like many who were expecting the court to overturn Roe vs. Wade, I am pleased that was not done. Certainly, the justices watered down a woman’s “fundamental right” to choose abortion, but they also staved off an anti-abortion “states’ rights” movement determined to make terminating a pregnancy a crime.

And they did this by a single vote.

“I am 83 years old,” wrote the author of the Roe decision, Justice Harry A. Blackmun, this time around. “I cannot remain on this court forever and when I do step down, the confirmation process for my successor well may focus on the issue before us today.”

In other words, it is back to politics again. Presidential candidates Clinton and Perot say they believe in a woman’s right to choose. President Bush says he wants Roe vs. Wade completely overturned.

On Capitol Hill, both houses are expected to consider the Freedom of Choice Act later this summer. If it passes, Bush has indicated he will veto the bill.

Women have reason to fear. We are reminded that our burden, still, is not ours to choose.