Abortion laws of Texas

In June 1969, Norman McCorvey, a 21 year old young woman discovered that she was pregnant with her third child. 
Her friends advised her to falsely claim that she had been raped in order to allow her legally have an abortion. This was, however, not to be as the law, then, in the state of Texas actually allowed abortion only for the purpose of saving the life of the mother. 

Lawsuit  
Norman attempted to obtain an illegal abortion but found that the unauthorised facility had been closed down by the police. 
Eventually she was referred to two lawyers who filed a civil suit against the state of Texas. 
The lawsuit was heard by a three-judge panel and on June 17, 1970 the three judges unanimously ruled in McCorvey’s favour and declared that the abortion law of the state of Texas was unconstitutional as it violated the right to privacy as found in the Constitution. 

Appeal 
The state appealed this judgment and the case was filed in the Supreme Court later that year. 
At that time the appeal would have been irrelevant as she had already given birth to her child and would not be affected by a ruling in her favour. The court, however, went ahead and decided on the ground that such a case as this was capable of repetition, yet evading review. 
Court also noted that pregnancy per se normally concluded more quickly than an appellate process. At about the same time there was another closely related matter in which Court held that abortion was a medical procedure and that physicians must be given room to determine what constitutes a danger to the physical and mental health of the mother. 
During the appeal, lawyers for the state of Texas argued that total bans on abortion were justifiable because life began at the moment of conception and the interest of the state to protect prenatal life applied to all pregnancies regardless of their stage. 

The case 
Court, however, said that there was no indication the Constitution’s use of the word person was meant to include foetuses and rejected the argument that a foetus should be considered a person with a legal and constitutional right to life. The Court also observed that there was still great disagreement over when an unborn foetus becomes a living being. “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary in this point in the development of man’s knowledge is not in a position to speculate as to the answer,” the court observed.

Constitutional right  
On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court issued a 7 to 2 decision in favour of Norman McCorvey that held that women in the United States have a fundamental right to choose whether or not to have abortions without excessive government restriction, and struck down Texas’ abortion ban as unconstitutional.
Court considered the concept of a constitutional right to privacy involving parental control over child bearing as well as reproductive autonomy with the use of contraceptives. Court ruled that the guarantees of the Constitution of the United States covered a right to privacy that generally protected a pregnant woman’s decision whether or not to abort a pregnancy. 

The Court reasoned that outlawing abortions would infringe a pregnant woman’s right to privacy for several reasons: Having unwanted children may force upon the woman a distressful life and future; it may bring imminent psychological harm; caring for the child may tax the mother’s physical and mental health; and because there may be distress for all concerned associated with the unwanted child.

Not absolute 
Court, however, ruled that this right to privacy was not absolute; it held that the abortion right had to be balanced against other interests. These other interests included protecting the mother’s health and protecting the life of the foetus.

To balance women’s rights to privacy and state government’s interests in protecting mothers’ health and prenatal life, the Court created a framework based on the three trimesters of pregnancy. 
During the first trimester, when it was believed that the procedure was safer than childbirth, the Court ruled that a state government could place no restrictions on women’s ability to choose to abort pregnancies other than imposing minimal medical safeguards, such as requiring abortions to be performed by licensed practitioners. 

Court also ruled that from the second trimester on, the evidence of increasing risks to the mother’s health gave states a compelling interest that that allowed them to enact medical regulations on abortion procedures so long as they were reasonable and narrowly tailored to protecting mothers’ health. From the beginning of the third trimester on, the point at which a foetus becomes viable under the medical technology then, Court ruled that a state’s interest in protecting prenatal life became so compelling that it could legally prohibit all abortions except where necessary to protect the mother’s life or health.

The judges also made various other observations; one noted that the Constitution made no direct mention of the right to choose an abortion without interference, but that the law on protection of liberty in truth extended beyond simple procedures and protected certain fundamental rights. Another judge ruled that a right not specifically enumerated in the Constitution should not be construed to mean that the American people should not possess it.  
The Chief Justice was of the opinion that it would be permissible to allow a state to require two physicians to certify an abortion before it could be performed.
To be continued