From St Pete Times

2,000 stories of regret swayed Court

Testimonials from Florida women figure in a Supreme Court ruling regarding abortion.

By JOHN BARRY
Published April 30, 2007

Each affidavit was just two or three sentences. They made no legal argument, contained no legal verbiage. Each just vented pain and guilt. "Twenty years later it still hurts, " one Florida woman wrote.

These affidavits helped sway the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling on April 18 that for the first time set limits on how abortions are performed. The testimonials were cited by Justice Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion upholding a federal ban on a procedure that opponents call "partial birth" abortions. "The emotional and psychological pain does not go away, " Kennedy wrote.

There were 2, 000 affidavits, 124 written by Florida women, all of whom have had abortions. They constitute "the largest body of legal evidence on how abortions hurt women, " says one of the women who collected testimonials in Florida.

"I went from an honor roll student to drug addict, " Dana Nicole Landers of Lakeland wrote about her abortion in 1997. It ended up in Kennedy’s opinion. "It came from my heart, " says Landers, now 28. "I never expected what I wrote to be part of an historic decision."

No similar testimonials were submitted by women who do not regret their decisions to abort. Those women number in the millions, abortion rights advocates assert.

"They’re the rule, not the exception, " says Wendy Grassi, director of public affairs for Planned Parenthood in southwest and central Florida. "We see it all. We see every array of emotion. The overwhelming one is relief."

"Two thousand women came forth, " says Olga Vives, executive vice president of the National Organization for Women. "But there are millions more whose lives have been saved."

* * *

Representative or not, the stories in these affidavits are part of a major strategic shift in the decades-old battle over abortion. The debate is no longer framed primarily around the rights of the fetus. It now posits an alleged harm to women, too.

Its genesis goes back to a famous 1988 court case that had nothing to do with abortion. The case involved surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead, who bore a child for another couple but wanted to keep the child after giving birth. Her lawyer argued that she could not have given informed consent until she held the baby in her arms.

Whitehead lost the case, but the legal argument was modified to fit the antiabortion movement: that women don’t always understand the harm they’re doing to themselves when they consent to abortions. This argument, and the affidavits supporting it, fueled the debate in South Dakota during a defeated attempt to ban abortions in 2006.

Yale University law professor Reva Siegel, an expert on abortion issues who has written extensively about the Whitehead case and its ramifications for abortion cases, says the affidavits are aimed at breaking a stalemate. She calls the rationale behind them is "a mix of new ideas about women’s rights and old ideas about women’s roles."

Many South Dakota voters embraced those new ideas, she says. They voted down the 2006 ban anyway, she says, because it made no exceptions for rape and incest.

With the Supreme Court ruling, the shift has taken hold. Siegel calls it the "Trojan horse" that may one day bring down the legal standard of Roe vs. Wade.

* * *

Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have long been open about their desire to overturn the court’s abortion precedents, including Roe. But it was Kennedy who wrote for the majority in the recent case, Kennedy who seized on the affidavits of the women.

An appendix to his opinion is about 100 pages long. It includes 180 testimonials, 10 from Florida. They all were part of a brief submitted by the Justice Foundation on behalf of women who say they were harmed by their abortions. The foundation, an antiabortion lobbying group, submitted a separate brief with 2, 000 more affidavits, about 124 of them written by Florida women. They were identified by name only.

Each is terse and sad.

"Even though I knew what I was doing, I suffered terrible grief and sadness afterwards, " wrote Loretta Bingham. "After the second one, I was called back to the clinic because they thought they hadn’t gotten all the baby out of me. In my mind I kept seeing an infant with its arms and legs pulled off."

Rebecca Porter of Plant City has been collecting such testimonials for three years. She’s the state leader for Operation Outcry, the Justice Foundation project for gathering the affidavits. She’s 48, mother of two grown sons. She had three abortions in her 20s, the last for twins, which she learned about only during the procedure.

Her own affidavit is among the 100 from Florida. It typifies those Kennedy cited. She wrote that she attempted suicide after the abortion of her twins and is still haunted.

"Even now it’s hard to put in writing, " she says.

Porter got involved in the antiabortion movement seven years ago, when she visited the Pregnancy Center in Plant City to volunteer. Each woman there was to fill out a form that described her abortion. "I was the only one who had to ask for three forms, " she says. "It was so shameful."

Last year, she stood in line all night to get a seat during oral arguments before the justices.

Justice Kennedy cited similar testimonials again and again in the ruling on "partial-birth" abortions. Kennedy concluded, "The real life experiences of the post-abortive women … confirm what the research has discovered. Typical responses from their sworn affidavits included depression, suicidal thoughts, flashbacks, alcohol and/or drug use, promiscuity, guilt and secrecy. Each of them made the ‘choice’ to abort their baby, and they have regretted their ‘choices.’ "

Says Siegel, the Yale law professor: "The reasoning is inarguable common sense to those committed to overturning Roe."

* * *

Most of the women from whom Rebecca Porter collects stories are like her, she says – their abortions were years ago, sometimes decades ago.

"Years later, the reality sets in, " she says.

She recalls last year’s exhibit of Chinese cadavers at Tampa’s Museum of Science and Industry. It showed fetuses early in gestation. "You see things like that, and it sets off a flood of emotions."

Most of the women she’s interviewed "don’t realize the impact, how their stories are affecting the nation, " she says.

Next up, she says: "We’ve prepared affidavits for men."

HT: OPeration Outcry..