Planned Parenthood V. Casey Case Study

Abortion is never an easy decision, but women have been making the choice for thousands of years. It has become a large dilemma since 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court passed a law making the procedure legal, and an even larger controversial issue. The controversy is divided into “Pro-Choice” and Pro-Life” views. Pro-Choice supporters believe that the woman should have to choice whether to abort or not. Pro-Life supporters believe that it should be illegal to abort and preformed. However, there are many ways for this procedure to be performed. Abortion still remains today a controversial issue, by who should determine if it is the right thing to terminate a pregnancy or not and by how the procedure should be preformed.

Before women had rights to decide whether they could keep their baby, some states didn’t allow abortion, therefore requiring women to give birth to their child. In today’s current issues, abortion is still a controversial subject with millions of people supporting it or not supporting it. Every woman has the right to make changes to her own physical body, and those rights should not be taken away, according to the constitution. In the very famous case in 1973, “Roe v. Wade”, the United States Supreme Court legalized abortion throughout the first trimester of pregnancy. In the article, “Roe’s Pro-Life Legacy”, it is explained how after this movement, the right to abortion, lives have changed and led to lower abortion rates (Sheilds 2013.)

There are many factors that are taken into consideration when determining if abortion is morally permissible, or wrong including; sentience of the fetus, the fetuses right to life, the difference between adult human beings and fetuses, the autonomy of the pregnant woman, and the legality of abortion. Don Marquis argues that abortion is always morally wrong, excluding cases in which the woman is threatened by pregnancy, or abortion after rape, because fetuses have a valuable future. Mary Anne Warren contends that late term abortions are morally permissible because birth is the most significant event for a fetus, and a woman’s autonomy should never be suspended.

Abortion has been a complex social issue in the United States ever since restrictive abortion laws began to appear in the 1820s. By 1965, abortions had been outlawed in the U.S., although they continued illegally; about one million abortions per year were estimated to have occurred in the 1960s. (Krannich 366) Ultimately, in the 1973 Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade, it was ruled that women had the right to privacy and could make an individual choice on whether or not to have an abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy. (Yishai 213)

Despite the fact that both parties hold opposing views both sides can hold a common ground. Everyone agrees that safer procedures are necessary. According to a Gallup poll geared towards finding the areas of consensus between pro-life and pro-choice, both sides agreed that “abortion should be legal when a woman's life or physical health is endangered by pregnancy and when pregnancy is caused by rape or incest” (Saad). Also both believe in the respect of

Jane Roe, a pregnant mother wanting to abort her child sued in the interest of herself, and other women in comparable circumstances during a struggle to stop Texas from criminalizing all abortions except the ones that would save the life of a mother. Texas had made it a crime to receive an abortion except when the doctor advises the mother have an abortion for her own health and safety. Jane Roe wanted a ruling that declared these Texas’ statutes to be unconstitutional and also, she wanted to prevent the District Attorney from enforcing them. Roe alleged that she was pregnant and unmarried. She could not legally obtain an abortion by a licensed doctor because her life was not endangered. So, she argued that the law was unconstitutional and invaded upon her privacy rights that were protected by multiple amendments and laws. Claiming it invaded upon her privacy rights by not allowing her to abort her child.

Planned parenthood V Casey: An abortion law required informed consent as well as a 24 hour waiting period prior to any abortion procedure in Pennsylvania. Any married woman had to state that her husband was in fact knowledgeable of this intention. Additionally, any minor seeking an abortion requires the consent of a parent. These laws were challenged by many clinics specializing in abortion, as well as many doctors. An appellate court upheld all of these stipulations with the exclusion of the married woman.

Not only has Planned Parenthood lied about the services that they provide, but a number of their own employees have filed lawsuits claiming that Planned Parenthood has cheated the system for their own profit. In 2011, Abby Johnson, the former director of the Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan, Texas, filed a lawsuit claiming that her affiliate had purposefully sent in approximately $6 million in false claims to Medicaid (Sedlak 15). Similarly, in 2008 a former financial executive of Planned Parenthood in California, P. Victor Gonzalez, filed a lawsuit against Planned Parenthood for overcharging state and federal governments by at least $180 million for birth control pills (Sedlak 15). Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas are currently entangled in a lawsuit that “alleges its involvement in ‘repeated false, fraudulent, and ineligible claims for Medicaid reimbursements’ through the Texas

In 1973, Roe v. Wade ruled a state law that banned abortions, except in the cases of risking the life of the mother, unconstitutional (Garrow 833). The Court ruled that states were forbidden from regulating or outlawing abortion performed during the first trimester of a woman’s pregnancy, could pass abortion regulations if they were related to the health of the mother in the second and third trimesters, and pass abortion laws protecting the life of the fetus in the third trimester (Paltrow 18). However, the primary concern would remain to be the mother’s health, regardless. Roe v. Wade, controversial since it was decided, divided America and continues to spark debates,

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PORTLAND, Oregon- “I was terrified,” plaintiff Dr. Warren Martin Hern stated as he heard he was on the “Deadly Dozen, GUILTY” poster. The first amendment has been strained throughout this case for the reasons of the unknown. The major question in the Planned Parenthood of the Columbia/Willamette, Inc. v. ACLA case is “what defines a true threat?”

Justice Blackmun argued that historically abortion was accepted and legal since the times of the Greeks and Romans. He pointed out that under common law, it was without dispute that an “abortion performed before “quickening”—the first recognizable movement of the fetus in utero, appearing usually from the 16th to the 18th week of pregnancy—was not an indictable offense.” Indeed, it was only in the last two centuries that any real regulation had been passed to punish the abortion of “quickening” fetuses. The abortion of a “pre-quickening” child was not illegal in the United States until it was banned in New York in 1860. To be sure, Blackmun argued that abortion laws in the United States were relatively stricter in the 1970’s than they had been in the past two thousand years. Therefore, under Blackmun’s argument, the Roe v. Wade ruling was more in step with the past interpretation of abortion law up to the middle of the nineteenth century.

In 1992, Roe v. Wade was upheld in Casey v. Planned Parenthood. However, the Supreme Court had become significantly more conservative in that time, and this ruling favored the states‘ rights to establish tighter abortion restrictions. In Pennsylvania, women were only permitted first trimester abortions if they had been given information about the fetus’s gestational state and the dangers of having the procedure. A married women was also required to inform her husband prior to having the abortion, and minors had to seek approval from at least one parent unless given a legal bypass. On top of these restrictions, there was also a mandatory 24-hour waiting period (McBride, “Casey v. Planned Parenthood”).

Never in the history of the United States, with the exception of the Slave Trade, has a public policy carved such an unmistakable social divide. Never before has a public policy spurned so many questions about social and political standards of American culture. To understand the abortion controversy and ultimately the Supreme Court’s involvement and decision in Roe v. Wade, the roots of abortion must be examined.