Privacy at stake
ABORTION ISN'T the only reproductive right at stake in the fight over who will replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court. There's also birth control.
The short version of history is that in 1973, the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade ruling said that a woman could terminate her pregnancy because of a constitutional right to privacy.
''The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy," Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in the court's decision. But ''the court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution" in decisions stretching back to 1891.
A key case in this history is Griswold v. Connecticut, a legal battle over birth control.
In 1961, Estelle Griswold and Dr. C. Lee Buxton opened a birth control clinic in New Haven. Griswold was the executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and she was out to test the strength of an 1879 Connecticut law that forbid the use drugs or devices to prevent conception. The clinic ran for 10 days. Then Griswold and Buxton were arrested, found guilty, and fined.
In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled that Connecticut's law was unconstitutional because it trampled the privacy rights of married couples. After the ruling, Connecticut's married women got access to birth control.
In the ruling, Justice William O. Douglas wrote, ''We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights - older than our political parties, older than our school system."
Connecticut was not alone in strapping tough laws on birth control. Massachusetts law banned the sale of contraceptives to unmarried women until 1972, when the Supreme Court ruled that treating married and single people differently was a violation of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause.
If members of a newly constituted Supreme Court unravel Roe v. Wade, they could undermine the right to privacy and access to birth control. If this happens, other attacks could gain force, including the current cases of pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions because of their personal values. The nonprofit advocacy organization NARAL Pro-Choice America points to refusals made this year in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.
The issues are in play. On Friday, the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis wisely ruled that the federal ban on partial-birth abortion was unconstitutional because it does not make an exception to protect the health of mothers. This decision could be appealed and overturned by the Supreme Court.
Americans should work to make abortion as rare as possible. But if the government revokes women's abortion rights, it would have excessive control over people's lives.
