Politics
Friday January 20, 2006
US Abortion Advocates Fear State-Level Incremental Gains for Right to Life
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By Hilary White
WASHINGTON, January 20, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - NARAL Pro-Choice America is worried that incremental gains by pro-lifers at the state level are making it impossible for many women to abort their “unwanted” children.
"It's a picking away at our freedom and privacy, legislature by legislature, law by law, with the ultimate goal of overturning Roe v. Wade," said NARAL president, Nancy Keenan.
While pro-life Americans continue working at the federal level to solve the constitutional deadlock created by Roe v. Wade, activists at the state level have met with much success in closing abortion facilities through regulations, state legislation requiring “cooling off” wait periods, parental notification and informed consent for mothers. Some states have only a single abortionist still working in them. South Dakota has none.
Indiana and Ohio are working to ban abortion completely. Mark Harrington, executive director of the Center for Bio Ethical Reform Midwest, a group supporting the Ohio legislation, said, “It is time to return the abortion issue to the states.”
Such groups hope that the state legislation, inevitably doomed to be overturned by the Supreme Court, will force the Court to re-examine Roe v. Wade.
Apart from the fight against Roe, pro-lifers hope to introduce the Supreme Court to other incremental restrictions favoured by most Americans. Mary Spaulding Balch, director of state legislation for the National Right to Life Committee, said, “We would hope there will be incremental gains that will take us closer and closer to the point where the unborn child will be protected. How fast or slow that will be, I don't know.”
According to recently updated counts by NARAL, 35 states have protections of various kinds for unborn children and their mothers in vulnerable crisis pregnancy situations based on parental consent or notification laws.
See NARAL’s charts and graphs page showing state-by-state abortion restrictions:
http://www.prochoiceamerica.org/yourstate/whodecides/maps/young_women.cfm
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