Women and Reproductive Rights

On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court overturned a Texas ruling that refused women the right to seek out and receive abortions. Sarah Weddington successfully argued this class action lawsuit, Roe vs. Wade, before the Supreme Court, thereby affecting the majority of the States in the Union by declaring their anti-abortion laws unconstitutional. The decision stated that a woman's right to an abortion fell within the right to privacy protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. The ruling, also, gave a woman a right to abortion during the entirety of the pregnancy with the state reserving the right to regulate abortion in the second and third trimesters. (Weddington 154-157)

It has been over 30 years since the ruling and, if anything, the debate surrounding a women's right to abortion services is more controversial and contentious that ever. Today, there are two extreme sides to this issue, the pro-life (against legalizing abortion) and pro-choice (for legalizing abortion) advocates, as well as an emerging middle ground that believes in the legislated limited access to legal abortion. This paper will discuss the key issues in the abortion debate today and will, in addition, explore the differences between the abortion debate today and the debate at the time of Roe vs. Wade.

During the 1970's, the time of Roe vs. Wade, the goal of legalizing abortion was to protect the life of the woman and to de-criminalize the act of seeking out and receiving an abortion. Women, at the time, were forced to travel to illegal clinics in another state, or even Mexico, and mostly found themselves in unpleasant, if not completely unsanitary, environments. Many times the 'doctor' attending to them wasn't even a real physician, and most times, the woman experienced complications at varying degrees that put her life in great danger. Advocates for legalizing abortion felt that the injury and deaths of many women could be eliminated if they had access to a safe and legal abortion provided by a licensed physician. It was the health and life of women for which the advocates of abortion were fighting. (Weddington 11-34)