U.S. abortion history fraught with resistance, unequal access and violence

In a watershed ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court hasoverturned thepivotal 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that recognized a woman's constitutional right to an abortion and legalized it nationwide.

The ruling on the case before the court, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, centred on a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks. You can readabout the 6-3 opinion delivered by Justice Samuel Alito and the potential effects here.

Since 1973's Roe v. Wade decision and leading up to the Dobbsruling, the abortion issue has been marked by debates around regulationof the medical procedure, access to itand shifting public opinion, as well as occasionalinstances of deadly violence.

While entire bookshelves can be filled with texts on abortion in modern American history, here are just a few notable events and themes.

Shifting attitudes

Nearly all U.S. states in August 1962 outlawed abortion entirelyor in all but the most exceptional circumstances, usually involving risk to a pregnant woman's life or health. That's when Sherri Finkbine, a host of the Phoenix version of the children's television show Romper Room, travelled to Sweden to have an abortion.

Finkbine, a mother of four, had unwittingly taken a medication containing thalidomide, which at thetime was already being linked to birth defects and infant death. She took her story public as a warning to others who may have taken the drug, in a newspaper story that only identified her as a Phoenix housewife. Her name was revealed in a later lawsuit filed by a local hospital administrator.

A decade before Roe v. Wade, the case was seen as revealing changing attitudes concerning a woman's right to choose to terminate a pregnancy in certain circumstances, with 52 per cent of respondents telling a Gallup surveyat the timethat Finkbine was doing the right thing, and32 per cent opposed to her decision.

But Finkbine paid a price, losing her job and enduringdeath threats.She eventually gave birth againand was a great-grandmother by the time she told the Arizona Republic in 2016 that she didn't regret her decision 54 years earlier.

"Just pondering whether to do it or not is a mental anguish," she said. "That is punishment."

Evolving opposition

Polling conducted by the Pew Research Center in April of this year indicated that 80 per cent of self-identified Democrats or those who lean Democrat agreedthat abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared to 38 per cent of those identifying as Republicans or leaning Republican.

Evangelical Protestants, largely white and overwhelmingly Republican, account for much of that disparity. Around 74 per cent of white evangelicals, according to Pew, say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, while60 per cent of white, mainline Protestants, who do not consider themselves evangelical, say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. (Black Protestants as a group support legalized abortion at a slightly higher level than that.)

This wasn't the case when theRoe v. Wade opinion was delivered in January 1973. In thatopinion, the court ruled that states could not ban abortion, as a woman's decision to terminate her pregnancy was protected under the right to privacy that flows from the 14th Amendmentof the U.S. Constitution.

It was a Catholic woman named Nellie Gray who started the still-ongoing March for Life rallies against abortion.And it was Catholic religious leaders who objectedmost vociferously to the ruling.At the time, Cardinal Patrick O'Boyle called the Supreme Court opiniona "catastrophe for America" and said the court had "embraced a policy of death."

By contrast, the 1971 pre-Roe resolution of the Southern Baptist Convention the most influential evangelical organization allowed for "the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother."

When the Roe opinion came down, the organization's Baptist Pressnews service concluded that "religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision."

But by the 1980s, religious groups and leaders, such as televangelist Jerry Falwell andreligious broadcaster Pat Robertson, were publicly railing against what they saw as liberal trends, such as abortion rights and burgeoning gay rights.

The so-called Republican Revolution of the 1994 midterms that gave the party control of both houses of Congresssaw lawmakers influenced by the vocal opposition to abortion rights reach Washington.

WATCH | Protesters emboldened by U.S. leak:

Potential overruling of Roe v. Wade emboldens Canadian anti-abortion activists

2 years ago

Duration 2:05

As the federal government takes steps to ensure abortion access in Canada, anti-abortion activists have been emboldened by the possibility of the U.S. Supreme Court rolling back abortion access.

By 2022, very few Republican politicians supported the right to terminate a pregnancy, with some at state levels notallowing exceptions for rape or incest a contrast to the situation in the 1980s, when a number of party members were pro-choice.

For its part, the Southern Baptist Convention by 2003, said it renounced the statements of its organization some 30 years earlier, arguing that Roe was "fundamentally flawed" and "an act of injustice against innocent unborn children." Life began at conception, they and other Christian groups reasoned.

As for Catholics, while leadership is still opposed to abortion 50 years later, 56 per cent of the American Catholics who responded to the Pew survey this spring agreed thatabortion should be legal in all or most cases.

Unequal access

In 1976, U.S. Congress enacted the Hyde Amendment, which barred the use ofMedicaid funds forabortion servicesin nearly all cases. Some states have made up that gap with provisions in their social programs, but not at all.

Citing statistics regarding Medicaid enrolments, the pro-choice research group Guttmacher Institute said the amendment disproportionately affects Americans with fewer means, and those who are Black or Indigenous.

"On average, an abortion at 10 weeks costs around $550 [US], which could be someone's entire monthly rent payment, and the cost increases as a pregnancy progresses," the group said in a 2021 news release on the amendment.

U.S. President Joe Biden voted in favour of the amendment in 1977, when he was a Delaware senator. Biden, a practising Catholic, has struggled with the abortion issue through the years but pivoted during the 2020 presidential campaign.

"If I believe health care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone's zip code," he said.

But so far, attempts by his administration to pass a government funding budget without the amendment have not passed Congress.

Deadly violence

Roe v. Wade galvanized thousands of peaceful anti-abortion protesters, but someabortion clinics became targets for extremists. Some doctors who performed abortions were attacked at their homes.

Things turned deadly in the 1990s.

Two Florida physicians, David Gunn and John Britton, were fatally shotin 1993 and 1994, respectively. Paul Hill, who also killedBritton's bodyguard, was eventually sentenced to death and executed forBritton's death.

A police officerworking his second job as a security guard was killed and a nurse wounded in a 1998 bombing outside an Alabama clinic carried out by Eric Rudolph, who was also responsible for three other bombings, including oneat the 1996Olympics in Atlanta.

American anti-abortion extremistJames Koppwasknown to have entered Canada but never definitively connected to three non-fatal attacks on abortion providers in Winnipeg, Vancouver and Hamiltonin the 1990s. He was convicted for the 1998 murder of abortion provider Barnett Slepian, near Buffalo, N.Y.

The ongoing threat was most illustrative in the case of Kansas physician George Tiller. Tiller's clinic was firebombed in 1986, he was injured in a shooting in 1993, and then gunned down in 2010 by an extremist.

Pushing the boundaries of 'undue burden'

The most consequential abortion ruling after Roe was 1992's Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The Supreme Court upheld the right to abortion in a 5-4 decision, again leaning heavily on the 14th Amendment.

But Casey, among its other impacts, introduced the concept of "undue burden" specifying that states couldn't impose restrictions on abortion that reached that hotly debated standard.

Since Casey, some states have pushed the boundaries of what's an undue burden,introducing 24-hour wait periods, mandatory sonogram requirements,mandatoryhospital admitting privileges for doctorsand strict prescribing protocols for medication that can trigger pregnancy termination.

The number of U.S. clinics that perform abortions dropped to around 800, from an early 1990s peak of over 2,000 locations, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

The push by states to regulate abortion accelerated after the Trump presidency saw the confirmation of three conservatives to the top court, making the Supreme Court composition a 6-3 majority of justices nominated by Republican presidents.

Texas then upped the stakes by introducing a law in which individuals can sue abortion providers, seen as a new front in the effort to limit the procedure, while Mississippi appealed the legalchallenge of its abortion ban all the way to the Supreme Court.