A slow slog toward success
“Our opponents have gotten very smart,” a leading pro-abortion activist told colleagues late last month in Washington DC at a conference organized by the American Constitution Society (ACS). This interesting event revealed that behind a self-confident façade, the best minds of the pro-abortion movement are deeply worried about the future. It took place only a week before a report from the Guttmacher Institute revealed that the US abortion has dropped to its lowest point since Roe v. Wade in 1973.
Under the guise of women’s health, ACS president Caroline Frederickson warned, new state and local laws are restricting American access to abortion. Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager at the Guttmacher Institute, added that the 2010 elections had “really shifted the composition” of American state legislatures and governorships. Subsequently, abortion restrictions “simply exploded” in a “tidal wave” of more than 200 local laws in the last three years in 30 states, more than in all of the previous decade. “Let me see what time it is” was the answer panel moderator Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post White House correspondent, jokingly attributed to Nash when asking her about the latest tally of abortion restrictions nationwide.
These laws were “really nearly everywhere” except for New England and the West Coast. Nash feels that progress will only be possible in California and Washington state. States and municipalities have become laboratories for new ideas on restricting abortion. In some states, abortion clinics have virtually disappeared, lamented Roger Evans, lead lawyer for America’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood.
And existing restrictions are tightening up. Mandatory waiting periods before abortion, for example, have gone from 24 to 72 hours in many places, a period that does not count weekends and holidays in states like South Dakota. The “inventiveness and ingenuity” of opponents in inventing new abortion restrictions, marveled the keynote speaker, Senator Richard Blumenthal, of Connecticut.
Another initiative which worries abortion activists is laws requiring hospital admitting privileges for abortion doctors. Planned Parenthood’s Evens describes this as yet “another idea to screw” them. Such laws would be the “next big ticket item” approaching Supreme Court review, and Evans was not optimistic about the outcome given a “dramatic political change in the courts”.