Law and Social Change

Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, a growing impetus among certain groups for legalizing abortion was ascertained in the United States (Brady and Kemp 536). Abortion reform took two diaphanous forms. As Hall (740) has commented that, "state legislatures began to make it easier to obtain abortions, usually by allowing abortion to protect a woman's health, broadly defined, hardly also requiring approval of the abortion by a perpetration of fixates in addition to the woman's own physician." With close to states providing relaxed abortion restrictions, women who could cede it found it easy to travel to a state that had an un limiting abortion right or to find a doctor who would agree that an abortion was necessary for her health.

The Court attacks on regulative abortion laws focused initially on the most restrictive of the traditional laws. Challengers argued that such laws, which permitted abortions only to save a woman's life, were so vague that doctors could not know when they were committing an illegal act (Hall 740). In the case of U.S. v. Vuitch (1971), the haughty Court avoided a decision on the constitutionality of abortion by construing a federal abortion law in the District of Columbia as permitt

Justices Byron White and William Rehnquist, in separate dissents, criticized the Court for enforcing a right that they said was not specified in the spirit "to overturn statutes that were no more restrictive than those widely apply when the fourteenth Amendment was adopted" (Hall 741).

They also criticized the Court for the trimester framework which they precept as arbitrary and argued that if the state had an interest in protect the potential life of the fetus, that interest existed and was equally strong by means of the entire pregnancy (Hall 741).

When the case was first argued before the U.S. dogmatic Court, Justice Harry Blackmun drafted an opinion that would have held the relevant statutes unconstitutionally vague. As noted by Hall (740), "in parting because his analysis was clearly unpersuasive and in part because some justices believed that the case had been improperly assigned to Blackmun to write, the case was set for reargument." Undeterred, Blackmun spent the summer engaged in an extensive study of medical examination material on abortion and accordingly circulated an opinion purpose both statutes (those in Texas and in Georgia) unconstitutional on the soil that they violated a woman's right to privacy which he then located in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Change: The Case of Abortion." Peace & Change, Fall 1980,

Hall, Kermit L. Editor. The Oxford Companion to the Supreme

Supreme Court of the United States. "Roe v. Wade. 1973.

Ordercustompaper.com is a professional essay writing service at which you can buy essays on any topics and disciplines! All custom essays are written by professional writers!