Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
On January 20, 1973, Richard Nixon was inaugurated to his second term as president. His landslide victory over Sen. George McGovern (D-SD) — who had been labeled the candidate of “acid, amnesty, and abortion” — was driven by a “Southern strategy” that reconfigured national politics.
Two days after Nixon’s inauguration, on the January 22nd, the then all-male Supreme Court voted 7-2, in Roe v Wade, to overturn a Texas law making it a crime to assist a woman to terminate her pregnancy. The Count found the law violated a woman’s due process rights.
Often forgotten, Justice Harry Blackmun noted, “… throughout the 19th Century prevailing legal abortion practices were far freer than they are today, persuades us that the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn ….” The Roe decision forced 46 states to liberalize their abortion laws and became the defining issue of the culture wars.
Personal privacy is at the heart of the debate over Roe as well as many of the other sex-related Court decisions over the last half-century. Before Roe, each state had the authority to determine the limits of a woman’s privacy, especially in terms of determining her pregnancy … and, possibly, an abortion.
Do Americans have a right to privacy? This “right” is not enumerated in the Constitution but the Ninth Amendment states, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain…