The Constitutional Right to Abortion

By Ken Concannon
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 12/9/04)

One Sunday in October, shortly before the November elections, Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press" interviewed two candidates for a Senate seat from South Carolina. Russert asked them a number of questions designed to clarify the two differing positions on a variety of political issues. The questioning soon turned to abortion.

After one candidate explained that he was pro-life and would like to see the Roe v. Wade decision reversed, and the other explained that she was pro-choice and fully supported Roe, Russert asked the pro-life candidate if, in a post-Roe world, he would recommend prosecuting women who had abortions. The pro-life candidate tried to avoid answering the question. When Russert repeated it, the pro-lifer said that questions of who gets prosecuted would be determined by federal and state legislators if and when Roe was reversed.

A couple of days after the election, a disgruntled John Kerry supporter called into C-Span's "Washington Journal," bemoaned the threat to abortion rights emanating from the election, and said that when Roe is overturned and women are being hauled off to jail for having abortions, only then will the country realize the awful consequences of this election. No response was offered to that comment.

Both the Russert interview — with its incredibly lame response from the pro-life candidate — and the comments of the C-Span caller illustrate how effectively the abortion industry and its protectors have manipulated the myths that surround Roe and the right to abortion. Let us examine one of those myths, namely that the Roe decision gave to women the constitutional right to abortion. It didn't. It gave doctors the right to provide abortion services.

For women who are not board-certified physicians, the right to abort doesn't exist. The nice lady next door, for example, can't just go out and buy a suction machine and hang up a shingle. That would be illegal.

Unlike other personal rights guaranteed by the Constitution — e.g. the right to vote, the right to express one's opinion, to worship, etc. — the right to abortion requires the concurrence of a third party before it can be used.

It is given indirectly to women through the abortion industry. Of course, the abortion industry wasn't what Justice Harry Blackmun had in mind when he wrote the Roe decision. He was thinking of Marcus Welby when he wrote: "the abortion decision, in all its aspects, is inherently, and primarily, a medical decision, and basic responsibility for it must rest with the physician."

"Marcus Welby, M.D." was an extremely popular ABC television series that enjoyed a seven-year run from 1969 to 1976. It starred the veteran actor Robert Young, who had previously portrayed the perfect dad in "Father Knows Best" for many years. The Dr. Welby portrayed by Young was an incredibly wise and caring general practitioner who knew his patients, understood their emotional as well as their medical needs and actually made house calls. When Blackmun, who had been a lawyer for the Mayo Clinic, wrote Roe v. Wade, Marcus Welby was at the height of its popularity, the medical profession was enjoying unprecedented public esteem and abortion advocates were arguing that abortion was a "private matter between a woman and her physician."

I doubt that when Blackmun entrusted the abortion decision to the medical profession he realized he would be creating a billion dollar abortion industry that would fight every attempt to make its practitioners accountable to the standards of medical practice envisioned by the former Mayo Clinic lawyer. I doubt that he foresaw, way back then, that most abortions would be performed in abortion mills by doctors whose patients never met them before, that almost all abortions would be performed as a backup for contraception and that at least a fourth of all abortions would be performed on women who didn't want them.

Had he known how unWelby-like abortion in America would turn out to be, maybe Blackmun would have worded the decision differently.

And maybe, if the pro-life candidate interviewed on "Meet the Press" a few weeks ago had been better informed he'd have responded to Russert's question about prosecuting women with an emphatic "No!" He'd have told the interviewer that American women have already been badly used by men who don't want to be accountable for their children and an abortion industry that doesn't want to be accountable for what it does.

Concannon is a freelance writer from All Saints Parish in Manassas.

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