View from Maine as Roe v. Wade turns 30

Everywhere one turns these days, the news is all about Iraq. Troop deployments are reported in minute detail; major dailies document, day after day, the latest saber rattle; and cable news networks are thoroughly obsessed with the business of handicapping not whether, but when, the United States will attack Baghdad.

Is it any wonder, then, that scarcely a moment’s attention has been paid to the imminent attack on reproductive rights being planned by social conservatives in Washington and Augusta as we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade?

As has been the case for most of the last decade, the staging area for this latest and by most measures, fiercest assault, is the U.S. House of Representatives, where the House Republican leadership is matching the military for preparedness and single-mindedness.

Dennis Hastert, the seemingly avuncular speaker of the House, has been joined by the irascible and impatient majority leader, Rep. Tom DeLay, in developing new rules for how the nation’s domestic legislative business will be transacted. In this new world, loyalty to “the team” now trumps seniority when it comes to selecting committee chairmen who decide the agenda. And the Hastert-DeLay agenda includes some of the most far-reaching elements of conservative social dogma of the last decade.

Now that the House decision-making apparatus is in place, the political approach is quite simple: When either President Bush or the House leadership are questioned directly about whether it is their intention to eliminate the protections afforded over the last three decades to women by Roe v. Wade, the response is a muted “no.”

The monosyllable is belied by nearly a dozen legislative measures, executive orders, and regulations all designed to make abortion illegal, prohibitively expensive, or impossible to access, including: The Abortion Non-Discrimination Act (ANDA); the Gag Rule; Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP); the blackout of scientifically accurate information about contraception and abortion from federal websites; the elevation of a fertilized egg in federal statute to personhood, to the detriment of women who thought they controlled their reproductive futures as guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. The list goes on and on.

As important as these issues are, they pale in comparison to what many in Maine believe: That it is a foregone conclusion that George W. Bush will be in a position to nominate at least one and possibly as many as three Justices to the Supreme Court. The Senate Judiciary Committee will review the appropriateness of the nominees and decide whether to send the nominations to the floor for a vote. If President Bush has his way, those nominees will be in a position to eviscerate, if not eliminate, Roe v. Wade.

On this 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, what do Mainers think? A statewide survey of more than 400 Mainers was commissioned by the Family Planning Association of Maine and carried out by the Portland Research Group last summer. The results are instructive:

. The majority of Mainers (58 percent) indicated that they think of themselves as “pro-choice” and believe that abortion is a “decision between a woman and her doctor and should be legal”;

. More than half of Mainers (56 percent) surveyed agreed that the government should provide funds for abortions to women unable to afford the medical service.

Maine is the only state in the nation with two pro-choice Republicans in the U.S. Senate. Their votes on the inevitable nominations to the Supreme Court ahead will be crucial. Their influence on their party’s position on abortion could be decisive. One can only imagine the pressure they will be subjected to, by party leaders and by advocates on both sides of the issue.

We must be clear: By their actions, President Bush and his allies in the House of Representatives have signaled that they intend to eliminate Roe v. Wade. But the drama will be played out in the Senate and Sens. Snowe and Collins can play a decisive role in determining whether Maine women will be able to celebrate future anniversaries of a Supreme Court decision that, for three decades, has emancipated women from the lifelong impact of unintended pregnancy.

George A. Hill is executive director of the statewide Family Planning Association of Maine. Ruth Lockhart is executive director of the Bangor-based Mabel Wadsworth Women’s Health Center.