April 18th, 2007:
The United States Supreme Court set limits on how abortions were
performed! For those of us who experienced a "poor choice"...
this was a huge step in preventing others the trauma of
abortion. Some of our personal contributions: stories,
affadavits, were impactful in the courts decision. Thanks to
each of you who shared your testimonies with the Supreme
Court!
The Justices of the Supreme Court of the United
States as of 2007.
2,000 stories of regret
swayed Court
Testimonials from women
figure in a Supreme Court ruling regarding
abortion.
By JOHN
BARRY
Published April 30, 2007
Each affidavit was just
two or three sentences. They made no legal argument, contained no
legal verbiage. Each just vented pain and guilt. "Twenty years later
it still hurts, " one Florida woman wrote.
These affidavits helped
sway the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling on April 18 that for the first
time set limits on how abortions are performed. The testimonials
were cited by Justice Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion
upholding a federal ban on a procedure that opponents call "partial
birth" abortions. "The emotional and psychological pain does not go
away, " Kennedy wrote.
There were 2, 000
affidavits, 124 written by Florida women, all of whom have had
abortions. They constitute "the largest body of legal evidence on
how abortions hurt women, " says one of the women who collected
testimonials in Florida.
"I went from an honor
roll student to drug addict, " Dana Nicole Landers of Lakeland wrote
about her abortion in 1997. It ended up in Kennedy's opinion. "It
came from my heart, " says Landers, now 28. "I never expected what I
wrote to be part of an historic decision."
No similar testimonials
were submitted by women who do not regret their decisions to abort.
Those women number in the millions, abortion rights advocates
assert.
"They're the rule, not
the exception, " says Wendy Grassi, director of public affairs for
Planned Parenthood in southwest and central Florida. "We see it all.
We see every array of emotion. The overwhelming one is
relief."
"Two thousand women came
forth, " says Olga Vives, executive vice president of the National
Organization for Women. "But there are millions more whose lives
have been saved."
* * *
Representative or not,
the stories in these affidavits are part of a major strategic shift
in the decades-old battle over abortion. The debate is no longer
framed primarily around the rights of the fetus. It now posits an
alleged harm to women, too.
Its genesis goes back to
a famous 1988 court case that had nothing to do with abortion. The
case involved surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead, who bore a child
for another couple but wanted to keep the child after giving birth.
Her lawyer argued that she could not have given informed consent
until she held the baby in her arms.
Whitehead lost the case,
but the legal argument was modified to fit the antiabortion
movement: that women don't always understand the harm they're doing
to themselves when they consent to abortions. This argument, and the
affidavits supporting it, fueled the debate in South Dakota during a
defeated attempt to ban abortions in 2006.
Yale University law
professor Reva Siegel, an expert on abortion issues who has written
extensively about the Whitehead case and its ramifications for
abortion cases, says the affidavits are aimed at breaking a
stalemate. She calls the rationale behind them is "a mix of new
ideas about women's rights and old ideas about women's
roles."
Many South Dakota voters
embraced those new ideas, she says. They voted down the 2006 ban
anyway, she says, because it made no exceptions for rape and incest.
With the Supreme Court
ruling, the shift has taken hold. Siegel calls it the "Trojan horse"
that may one day bring down the legal standard of Roe vs.
Wade.
* * *
Justices Clarence Thomas
and Antonin Scalia have long been open about their desire to
overturn the court's abortion precedents, including Roe. But it was
Kennedy who wrote for the majority in the recent case, Kennedy who
seized on the affidavits of the women.
An appendix to his
opinion is about 100 pages long. It includes 180 testimonials, 10
from Florida. They all were part of a brief submitted by the Justice
Foundation on behalf of women who say they were harmed by their
abortions. The foundation, an antiabortion lobbying group, submitted
a separate brief with 2, 000 more affidavits, about 124 of them
written by Florida women. They were identified by name
only.
Each is terse and
sad.
"Even though I knew what
I was doing, I suffered terrible grief and sadness afterwards, "
wrote Loretta Bingham. "After the second one, I was called back to
the clinic because they thought they hadn't gotten all the baby out
of me. In my mind I kept seeing an infant with its arms and legs
pulled off."
Rebecca Porter of Plant
City has been collecting such testimonials for three years. She's
the state leader for Operation Outcry, the Justice Foundation
project for gathering the affidavits. She's 48, mother of two grown
sons. She had three abortions in her 20s, the last for twins, which
she learned about only during the procedure.
Her own affidavit is
among the 100 from Florida. It typifies those Kennedy cited. She
wrote that she attempted suicide after the abortion of her twins and
is still haunted.
"Even now it's hard to
put in writing, " she says.
Porter got involved in
the antiabortion movement seven years ago, when she visited the
Pregnancy Center in Plant City to volunteer. Each woman there was to
fill out a form that described her abortion. "I was the only one who
had to ask for three forms, " she says. "It was so
shameful."
Last year, she stood in
line all night to get a seat during oral arguments before the
justices.
Justice Kennedy cited
similar testimonials again and again in the ruling on
"partial-birth" abortions. Kennedy concluded, "The real life
experiences of the post-abortive women ... confirm what the research
has discovered. Typical responses from their sworn affidavits
included depression, suicidal thoughts, flashbacks, alcohol and/or
drug use, promiscuity, guilt and secrecy. Each of them made the
'choice' to abort their baby, and they have regretted their
'choices.' "
Says Siegel, the Yale law
professor: "The reasoning is inarguable common sense to those
committed to overturning Roe."
* * *
Most of the women from
whom Rebecca Porter collects stories are like her, she says - their
abortions were years ago, sometimes decades ago.
"Years later, the reality
sets in, " she says.
She recalls last year's
exhibit of Chinese cadavers at Tampa's Museum of Science and
Industry. It showed fetuses early in gestation. "You see things like
that, and it sets off a flood of emotions."
Most of the women she's
interviewed "don't realize the impact, how their stories are
affecting the nation, " she says.
Next up, she says: "We've
prepared affidavits for men."
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