The Law: A Stunning Approval for Abortion

SOON after her illegitimate son was born two years ago, "Jane Roe," a divorced Dallas bar waitress, put him up for adoption. At almost the same time, "Mary Doe," an Atlanta housewife, bore a child who was also promptly adopted. Both women had asked for abortions and, like thousands of others, they had been turned down. Unlike most of the others, though, Roe and Doe went to court to attack the state statutes that frustrated them. The resulting legal fights took too long for either woman to get any practical benefit. But last week they had the satisfaction of hearing the Supreme Court read their pseudonyms into the annals of constitutional law. By a surprising majority of 7 to 2, the court ruled that Roe and Doe had won one of the nation's most fiercely fought legal battles. Thanks to the Texas waitress and the poverty-stricken Georgia housewife, every woman in the U.S. now has the same right to an abortion during the first six months of pregnancy as she has to any other minor surgery.

So bold and uncompromising is the ruling that no state is unaffected. Most, like Texas, have permitted abortion only when the mother's life was threatened; in effect, they now have no surviving law on the subject. Other states, like Georgia, which allowed doctors to terminate pregnancies that endangered a mother's health, resulted from rape or were likely to produce malformed babies, will have to revise their laws substantially. Even the four states (New York, Washington, Hawaii and Alaska) that have allowed unrestricted abortions will probably have to make some changes. All of them have maintained residency requirements, which have now been held unconstitutional.

Privacy. Writing for the majority —and aware of the potential impact of the decision—Justice Harry Blackmun laced his opinion with a precise set of guidelines. During the first three months of pregnancy, wrote Blackmun, "the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician." After the first trimester, a state may "regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health," for instance by requiring hospitalization. But to demand that a panel of doctors okay the abortion, said Blackmun, is an unconstitutional complication. Only after the fetus has developed enough to have a chance of survival on its own—usually during the seventh month—may a state "regulate and even proscribe abortion except where it is necessary. . .for the preservation or health of the mother."