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Related: About this forumA Quiet Victory
A Quiet VictoryJennie Linn McCormack had just finished doing laundry and putting her 2-year-old son to bed when she heard a knock one evening in May 2011. McCormack, a single mother of three living off child support checks, opened the door to find a police officer. He was there to arrest her. The officer explained that McCormack had committed a serious felony under Idaho lawby giving herself an abortion. He proceeded to barrage her with invasive questions about her body and her ex-boyfriend.
How can you question me about my personal stuff? McCormack demanded, according to an NPR report.
Well, the officer apparently responded, theres legal and theres personal. The state charged McCormack with intentionally self-terminating her pregnancy, a crime punishable by up to five years in prison.
After several humiliating hearings, McCormack and her attorney defeated the charge. McCormack actually had given herself an abortion in late 2010, mostly out of desperation: There were no abortion clinics anywhere in southeast Idaho, and an abortion in Salt Lake City, 138 miles away, could cost $2,000. So McCormack procured abortion pills online and took five. She hadnt realized that her fetus was between 19 and 23 weeks oldand that she was much too far along in her pregnancy to have a safe nonsurgical abortion. McCormack told her friend about the abortion. The friend told her sisterand her sister told the police, who found the fetus wrapped in bags on McCormacks back porch.
After a judge dismissed the case against her for lack of evidence, McCormack was legally off the hook. But she was also furious: furious that Idaho had intruded so deeply into her private life, furious that its strict abortion laws had driven her to such desperate extremes, furious that other women in her situation might be forced to undergo unsafe abortions at their own hands. So McCormack and her lawyerwho happened to also be a doctorbrought a class action in federal court, seeking to have a slew of Idahos draconian anti-abortion laws struck down as unconstitutional.
On May 29, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted McCormacks wish. It affirmed a lower courts invalidation of the self-induced abortion statute, as well as three other laws: one that barred abortions of fetuses at 20 weeks postfertilization, one that required all second-trimester abortions to occur in hospitals, and one that placed onerous burdens on clinics in the form of safety regulations. The litigation may not be over: Idaho can ask a bigger panel of 9th Circuit judges to rehear the case or appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. Still, as states like Wisconsin move closer to enacting shockingly stringent abortion laws, the decision is a powerful affirmation of constitutional autonomy in an age when that value is in short supply.
You might not guess it from the recent rash of insane restrictions, but abortion is still constitutionally protected throughout the United States. In 1992s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court held that a state cannot impose an undue burden on a woman seeking to obtain an abortion before fetal viability. Under Casey, a state can attempt to persuade a women to keep her fetus but cannot flatly bar her from aborting it. The ability to retain ultimate control over ones reproductive capacities, the court held, involves choices central to personal dignity and autonomy that are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.
The 9th Circuit found Idahos abortion laws to be unconstitutional by doing what other federal courts have refused to do: taking Casey seriously. A categorical 20-week abortion ban, the court explained, would necessarily bar some previability abortions, since fetuses gestate at different rates. Prohibiting a woman at 20 weeks postfertilization from obtaining an abortioneven if her fetus is not yet viableis a quintessential undue burden prohibited by the Supreme Court. Similarly, a related law that requires all second-trimester abortions to occur in hospitals simply has no basis in medical necessity.
Finally, the law burdening abortion clinics with intricate regulations, the court explained, was unconstitutionally vague: It required clinics to meet certain criteria (like being properly staffed) without explaining what those criteria actually meant. The law seemed designed to frustrate and terrify clinics, not keep them safe.
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/06/jennie_linn_mccormack_case_court_strikes_down_idaho_s_abortion_laws.html
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A Quiet Victory (Original Post)
Novara
Jun 2015
OP
marym625
(17,997 posts)1. In a country that is supposed to be so advanced,
that pretends to take human and civil rights so seriously, we sure do have a lot of laws that are meant to do nothing but control us.
Great work by McCormack and her attorneys.