Separate And Emphatically Unequal: Court Rulings Using An ‘Undue Burden’ Test, With Clinics In An Adjacent State, To Restrict Access To Abortion

Please read author/activist Robin Marty's article at TPM, "Is One Key Anti-Abortion Attack Beginning To Fall To Pieces?" (There's no need for me to repeat its extensive content, and it's too complex to summarize effectively.) You'll learn about the latest attempts to legislate de jure obstructions to abortions, access to which women are constitutionally guaranteed by Roe v. Wade, and possible changes in federal court responses to various "no undue burden" assertions used in recent decades by courts seeking grounds on which to vindicate various new state anti-abortion laws.

This is surely a risky business... but so is the whole process since Roe more than 40 years ago. Women's constitutional rights absolutely should not depend upon the votes of one or two federal district courts determined by a woman's state of residence, or (more recently) upon the religious affiliation of two-thirds (6 of 9) of the Justices of the US Supreme Court. But they do. The more such state laws are passed... the more federal district court rulings that validate those laws... the more women of reproductive age have a very real chance if living into a second era in which their constitutional right to control their own reproductive status is willfully destroyed by one or more of five aged men on SCOTUS. Ladies, keep your eyes open... and be prepared to take your arguments to the streets if nothing else works. In a just world, America should be faced with a simple choice: an uncompromising protection of the rights of ALL its citizens irrespective of gender, or a coordinated response to restrictions which brings America's male-dominant society to its knees. A baldfaced compromise of the civil liberties of half the American public is wholly unacceptable.

I will restate my fundamental principle on the matter: Every child a wanted child; every birth a healthy birth; every decision regarding a woman's reproductive status and health a decision affirming wholeheartedly the woman's own position. No exceptions!