Sandra Fluke, Georgetown University Law Students for Reproductive Justice

This blog is part of the #HERvotes blog carnival.

As you may have recently read in the New York Times, although Georgetown’s student health insurance doesn’t cover contraception, it does cover birth control pills when they’re prescribed for medical reasons other than preventing pregnancy (e.g. severe acne, mood disorders, etc.).  This is called the “over-ride” process because it over-rides the usual ban on contraceptive coverage.  Unfortunately, this over-ride process is terribly flawed and fails many women at Georgetown.  The problems with this process illustrate the consequences for women’s health when university administrators dictate which reasons for a birth control prescription are the “right” reasons.

Because of an obsession with preventing students from fraudulently using the over-ride to get contraception coverage for the “wrong” reason (preventing pregnancy), students who attempt to use the over-ride process are sometimes subjected to questioning and accusations that they are lying about their qualifying medical needs.  This is followed with long delays and bureaucratic barriers that don’t exist for any other prescription covered by Georgetown’s insurance.  The Times profiled how Georgetown’s policy resulted in a medical tragedy for one woman.  In response a Georgetown spokeswoman said that:

problems like this were rare and that doctors at the health service knew how to help students get coverage for contraceptives needed for medical reasons.

If only that were true!  Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice actually surveyed students at the law school about this.  For some students, the over-ride process works adequately, but 65% of students attempting to utilize the over-ride process reported being subjected to extensive questioning, inordinate clerical issues, extensive delays, or other complications because of disbelief from doctors and insurance administrators.  20% either never received their medication or were never reimbursed by the insurance company.  Here are the experiences of just a few students:

I was without birth control for many months because of problems with the over-ride.  I spoke with people at [the student health] clinic, the Georgetown main insurance office, the insurance company, the drug insurance company, and a pharmacy.  I was put on hold multiple times and had to call some of these people multiple times.  After investing at least ten hours in the process, I gave up. . . .

Simply because I am sexually active, the doctor assumed I was lying even though I have medical needs.  I struggled with getting an over-ride because the doctor was hesitant even though I reported severe pain and mood changes that affect my functioning as a student. . . .

[M]y OB/GYN suspects that I have endometriosis and I took a specific pill to help control it.  Endometriosis cannot be definitively diagnosed without surgery, and obtaining a waiver was stressful and time consuming.  It unnecessarily distracted me from my classes. . . .

I have found the health care coverage ban on birth control embarrassing and potentially harmful.  When scheduling a yearly gynecological exam, I was subject to a line of hostile questioning twice: once by the person scheduling the exam and once by the doctor performing the exam.  The questions included queries about my sexual history, which seems appropriate for the doctor to ask about, but not the scheduler.  A yearly gynecological exam is a recommended procedure and may not even be tied to a birth control prescription.  Georgetown’s refusal to cover birth control creates a potential burden on a woman getting this exam at all. . . .

Tragically, Georgetown’s policy has also created rampant misinformation regarding student insurance coverage of women’s reproductive healthcare generally, leading to some students foregoing essential medical care:

[I] was intimidated by the [‘override’] process and thus I did forego OBGYN care for over a year.  More importantly, the reputation that Georgetown has as being . . . unsupportive of women’s reproductive health prevented me from seeking out STD testing after I was sexually assaulted.  (I assumed [Georgetown] would not cover my HIV/STD testing because when I was tested last year at my provider’s office . . . as part of a regular/routine exam, I paid $500 due to lack of coverage.  It was not until several months after I was assaulted that I found out . . . that [Georgetown] would cover such tests.  In general, there is a problematic lack of info about women’s health coverage on campus.  I did not even know I could get an OBGYN exam at the law center until a friend told me my 2L year.  While I support Georgetown’s Jesuit identity and am a person of faith myself, I find our school’s policy to be . . . harmful to students. . . .

I’d say “harmful to students” is putting it lightly.  That’s why we’re so thankful that the new Affordable Care Act regulations will protect vulnerable students and end these types of dangerous insurance policies!

Emily T. Wolf, Vice-President, Fordham Law Students for Reproductive Justice

This blog is part of the #HERvotes blog carnival.

Fordham University is a Jesuit school.  Because of this, students are not able to get birth control prescribed to them at the on-campus health centers.  Fordham LSRJ wanted to provide Fordham students with a way to have access to doctors and birth control prescriptions.  Here’s how we did it:

Step One:  Identify a Specific Problem

The problem that we chose to tackle was the fact that there was no notice on the health center’s website that students would not be able to receive standard health care.  There was no information that stated the health center is not able to prescribe birth control.  Under the heading “Women’s Health,” the site stated, “routine gynecological exams are available.”  If you searched further, you would find a question under the FAQs about scheduling a gynecological exam with some additional language:

“Remember, Fordham University is a Catholic and Jesuit University. As such, the physicians, nurse practitioners, and staff of the Health Center abide by the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services.  Those interested in these directives can read them, usccb.org/about/doctrine/ethical-and-religious-directives/ (You will leave this website.)”

If you follow that link, you will need to click on the 43 page document, and read it.  If you do a search for “contraception,” “birth control,” or “condom,” you will find zero matches within the document.  If you search for “contraceptive,” you will find three matches, including text that states, “Catholic health institutions may not promote or condone contraceptive practices but should provide, for married couples and the medical staff who counsel them, instruction both about the Church’s teaching on responsible parenthood and in methods of natural family planning.”

This was sufficiently vague and hidden such that students were not likely to be aware of this practice.  It does not state that Fordham University forbids its nurse practitioners from prescribing birth control at its on-campus health centers.  It is especially confusing given other language on the website that explains the health insurance offered by Fordham is required by New York law to cover birth control prescriptions.  So students who need birth control will need to go to a different health care provider and incur additional costs.

Fordham LSRJ spoke to the Director of Student Health Services at Fordham, who explained that there is a medical exception to these birth control directives.  So, theoretically, students who have health reasons for which birth control is standard treatment should be able to get a birth control prescription.  However, this is not the case.  We have information from many students who went to the health center with documented medical reasons to be on prescription contraceptives (endometriosis, ovarian cysts, dysmenorrhea) and were denied birth control.  We have not heard from any student who was prescribed hormonal contraceptives for any reason.

Step Two:  Identify Solutions

Our first solution was to ask the health center to update the website to reflect that students could not receive birth control prescriptions at Fordham.  This sounded easy and entirely reasonable!  We thought that it was a simple oversight on Fordham’s part not to include this information on their website.  We were wrong.

We began by writing a letter to the president of the University in October, explaining the situation and how it could be resolved.  We made this request from the position of consumers of Fordham’s health insurance looking for information, rather than as a group making demands.  We explained that adequate notice of Fordham’s policies were imperative in order to allow students to make the best decision regarding their health care.

We received an answer to our letter about two weeks after we sent it.  The response was basically that the University would look into making the communications and policies more clear.  (The website was eventually updated on January 23.)   Our follow-up questions to where these policies exist were met with a vague response stating the policy is reflected in the mission and tradition of the University.

At this point, we wanted to do something to draw attention to the issue and also something to help provide health care to the students who needed it.  And so we arrived at our next solution:  host a birth control clinic on or near campus!

Step Three:  Use the Resources in the Reproductive Justice Community to Make It Happen

Of course, we didn’t know exactly where to start.  We began by contacting the national LSRJ office, as well as some of our professors for names of doctors or nurse practitioners who would be willing to help us.  We were eventually put into contact with the amazing Institute for Family Health here in New York.  The doctors there were more than willing to come to Fordham to put on a clinic that would provide health care access to students.  They were also able to do this at no cost, which was a great help, since Fordham had asked us not to use any University funds for this event.

We also held our event just off campus at the New York Institute of Technology.  Fordham would not allow this event on campus.  NYIT was generous to provide us with a perfect space for the clinic without cost.

So we had an idea for an event (check), event space (check), doctors to prescribe birth control and answer questions (check), food (check – paid for by an anonymous donor), and prizes for reproductive rights jeopardy (check – thanks LSRJ!).  Now we just needed to let people know about the event.  We went to the press, submitting dozens of tips to any news source we could think of, which ended up being very successful.  The attention from the press led to even more support for our event, and we were able to get literature and support from other reproductive rights organizations, such as NARAL and Catholics for Choice.

Ginormous event poster - check! Photo of Leila and Emily in our lovely cafeteria courtesy of Bridgette.

During the event-planning process we ran into some roadblocks.  We weren’t able to put up posters around the law school advertising the event (our posters were not approved by Student Affairs), so we emailed the student body and asked students to put up mini-posters on their lockers that line the hallways of the law school.  We got an amazing response to this, and soon the school was full of posters anyway.  We also had some difficulties with our first space that we rented for the clinic.  We chose a space in a building just off campus that housed several floors of Fordham classrooms.  We thought that it would be convenient since students were already familiar with the space.  After we signed a rental contract, the organization refused to let us use the space. This was frustrating, and meant a time-consuming scramble for a new space, but we got it done.

So, how did it go?

Our birth control clinic and sexual health fair was a huge success!  Over one hundred people came to support us and forty women received birth control prescriptions.  The students who came engaged in small discussions around the room, and it was great to see many of the issues surrounding birth control at Fordham being hashed out.  It was also amazing to provide answers to questions that students had about Fordham policies or anything else, and to direct students to other resources when we did not know the answers.  We were so happy to have helped these students receive health care that they may not have received otherwise.

Lots of quality discussion! Photo courtesy of Fordham Observer.

Our event drew some local and national attention, largely due to the timing of the Department of Health and Human Services debating whether to extend the religious exemption to include religious universities in November and determining against this decision this January.  Our event was discussed in diverse media sources, such as Fox News, the New York Times, the Fordham Observer (here and here), Jezebel, RH Reality Check (here and here and here for podcast), Above the Law, the New York Daily News, Slate, the Huffington Post, the Daily Mail, and the National Catholic Register, among others.  We were interviewed for some of these publications, but not all.  In some cases, the authors of the articles misunderstood our event, and we made an effort to contact those authors to correct them in order to ensure our message was clear.  It was really interesting to read about our event in these sources, and to read the many (positive and negative) comments generated by those articles.

Bridgette being interviewed by Fox News. Photo courtesy of Emily.

We had our event attendees fill out a brief exit survey, which was helpful in determining how many people attended and the issues that mattered to them.  We received a lot of positive feedback from the students who attended, and got some great ideas for future birth control events.  For example, we heard several comments asking for “more diverse types and sizes of condoms” and “guest speakers for next time.”  My personal favorite piece of feedback was from an undergraduate who stated she said, “I posted about the event on my Facebook wall, and then got a message from my father, telling me to ‘grow up.’  Being conscious about my sexual health is growing up!”

This January, the University did update the website to address some of our concerns about the lack of clarity on Fordham’s policy.  We are glad that some progress was made.  The website now discusses birth control in two places – once in the FAQs and once in the Women’s Health Care section, where it is explicitly stated that “[n]either contraceptives nor birth control are distributed or prescribed on premises as a standard practice. Student Health Services does make limited exceptions for the treatment of medical conditions accompanied by supporting documentation.”  The language here is very clear, which we appreciate.  However, we still want to know what medical conditions are considered, of what severity, and what documentation students need if they have a medical reason to be prescribed oral contraceptives.  Given the requirement of documentation from and outside doctor, we also want to know why the people treating us aren’t allowed to make these diagnoses themselves.  We hope to continue working with Fordham to clarify these policies and educate students about the policies as much as possible.

Our impressions of this process left us in awe of the support that we received from the reproductive justice community.  We got many emails from students, professors, and alumni who were behind us.  We also were happy to see that it was really easy to put together the event with the support of the community.  But best of all, we helped Fordham women receive health care.

Candace Gibson, University of Utah College of Law

*The views expressed in this blog post are those of the blogger herself; she is not speaking on behalf of Law Students for Reproductive Justice.*

Many of my law school colleagues and I have dipped our toes in the immigration law pond.  In my experience, when people ask me what type of law I am most interested in, and I say, “immigration law,” it invites a conversation that I don’t want to have.  I’m hesitant to speak about immigration because I never know if the person on the other side will be an individual who has no idea that our immigration system is broken and will use language that is derogatory to me and the clients I’ve worked with.

With the start of Utah’s legislative session this week, I am not only feeling this hesitancy but anger.   Representative Herrod, who has announced that he will join the U.S. Senate race to upseat Senator Hatch, has decided to sponsor legislation that would gut the Utah Immigration Accountability and Enforcement Act passed last year.  The Utah Immigration Accountability and Enforcement Act would create a guest worker program for those who are undocumented in Utah but would like to legally work and live in the state.  In order to get a permit, individuals would have to get a background check, take English and civic classes, and their tax contributions would be tracked.   Aside from the constitutional issues at hand and the likely possibility that the federal government will not give a waiver so that the state can implement this legislation, many immigration advocates were excited because the bill was solution-oriented.  Herrod’s legislation would convert the Accountability and Enforcement Act to the Utah Illegal Alien Family Transition Pilot Program.  Don’t you love the name?  His legislation would only allow individuals who have either (1) overstayed their visas or (2) let their visas expire and have children of a certain age and that were born in specific countries apply. Individuals who came into the country without inspection or through non-legal means could not apply.  The bill would allow local enforcement agencies to detain individuals who they suspect of being in the country without any legal status and punish law enforcement agencies that do not comply with enforcement laws by withholding state funds from them.   Before any of this happens, the bill states that our congressional delegates must lobby for amending federal immigration statutes so that Utah may implement this program.  Herrod said this about his bill, “The forgotten person in all of this has been the legal immigrant. We’ve passed laws that are aiding those who come here illegally. That is wrong; we need to work on laws that aid the legal immigrant.”

What Herrod has forgotten or does not want to acknowledge is that in some places in the world there is no functioning way to legally migrate to the U.S.  If I have to wait at least ten years to migrate from Mexico through a family based visa or if my only other option is to be sponsored through an employer, that is not a functioning immigration system.   I am all for state legislation that pushes the federal government to reform our broken immigration system, but legislation that guts another bill that may be unconstitutional is a waste of time and only foments a heated debate.

Reproductive justice isn’t just about abortion and contraceptives, but about improving the lived realities that impact people’s ability to decide when, how, and if they want to parent.  Because many immigrant women have no legal status, they are more subject to intimate partner violence, lack insurance coverage, and are vilified through the media as mindless, breeding machines whose sole purposes are to birth “anchor babies” and “terrorists.” Immigrant women are clearly part of this struggle. In Utah alone, immigrant women already have been targets of gender-specific threats.  In 2010, Concerned Citizens of the United States compiled a list of 1300 individuals who they thought were in Utah without legal status, asking them to be deported, and sent the list to media outlets.  The list included names, social security numbers, and even pregnant women and their expected due dates.    Herrod’s bill isn’t going to help most immigrant women and it definitely isn’t adding anything new to our country’s immigration debate. 

Blogger Katie Halper gives us three reason why we wish we wish we could quit the Susan G. Komen Foundation. If your jaw hasn’t already dropped from hearing the news, the Komen Foundation has pulled funding from Planned Parenthood. Not cool, SGK, not cool.

Update: Interesting. Komen just announced they would “continue to fund existing grants” including those to Planned Parenthood. It’s still unclear, however, whether they will actually renew grants to PP. Could just be a make-nice public statement.  Stay tuned!

Low income and uninsured women of color are hit hard with funding cuts which may result in losing access to breast cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood. Oh, the irony.

More on Komen and a petition or two.

So where’s the noise? When it comes to Anti-choice outrage on the forced sterilizations of women of color, we’re hearing crickets.

Cindy Pearson reflects on how back in her day the co-pay for a month’s worth of contraceptives was a dollar. Oh, how times have changed.

Emily T. Wolf, Vice-President, Fordham Law Students for Reproductive Justice

This blog is part of the #HERvotes blog carnival and is cross-posted from Fordham LSRJ’s blog.

After spending the past three semesters trying to understand Fordham University’s birth control prescription policy, we recently had a small victory when the University updated the health center’s website to clarify that birth control will not be prescribed at Fordham unless the student has a medical exception.  This victory came at the same time as a larger victory announced by the Department of Health and Human Services that a religious exemption to contraceptive coverage in health insurance will not be extended.

This is great news for students.  While insured students at Fordham and in New York are already covered by a New York state law that mandates insurance coverage for contraceptives (as well as students in 27 other states), this will ensure that all students who attend religious universities will be able to receive contraceptive at a more reasonable cost without a copay.  As we know, students are a vulnerable population (almost one in five young women ages 18-24 have experienced forced sexual intercourse) and low-cost contraception is an important part of being able to foster our own sexual health decisions.  Contraception can also ensure that students are able to decide when and how to parent children, which will certainly have an effect on students’ future careers.

Students of many different faiths and experiences attend religious universities.  While those in favor of a more broad religious exemption may have a problem with contraception as an imposition to their consciences, similar exemptions are already in place in over half of the states.  The Obama administration must continue to stand up for all of us to ensure that we receive the health care we need to survive and thrive.

Joanne Caceres, Harvard Law School

It is a cold and quiet month for Harvard LSRJ. Our “January Term” is winding down, a one month term where one can take a class, write a paper, or work at an externship, and it  means that Harvard students spread out across the country and organization activities slow down. But that’s not to say we’re not revving up for the spring! We are looking forward to our regional conference in February, our annual Sex-Ed Trivia event, and an in-the-works social justice conference centered around economic justice.

In addition, Harvard is offering an International Reproductive Rights Reading Group, which I and several LSRJ’ers will be eagerly participating in. The reading group coincides with one of our goals for our chapter this term, which is to put on at least one event about reproductive justice in the international sphere. Of course, there is also plenty going on domestically, and I am disappointed with politicians on the right and left (Mitt Romney’s statement that Griswold v. Connecticut may have been improperly decided and Obama’s support of Kathleen Sebelius’ reversal of the FDA’s recommendation to sell Plan B over the counter to minors both immediately come to mind). It all reminds me that it is an important time for lawyers who care about reproductive justice to be involved.

Mallory Carlberg, University of Oklahoma College of Law

*This post is part of a series written in support of Trust Women Week Silver Ribbon Campaign and the online virtual march from January 20-27. LSRJ is proud to partner with numerous orgs across the country – join the march by sending a message to your lawmakers today! And check back here throughout the week for more posts.

With the anniversary of Roe and the start of a new year, January is a time of reflection for the reproductive justice movement. Reproductive rights organizations publish summaries of the previous year’s anti-abortion legislation and predict what’s to come as state legislatures reconvene. OU LSRJ students have been discussing new bills Oklahoma legislators will introduce this session. In addition to the widely publicized bill outlawing the use of fetuses in the food industry. Legislators will also introduce a personhood bill and a bill requiring the use of an electric fetal heart monitor during abortion procedures. It’s easy to focus solely on the abortion debate since abortion opponents are often loudest about this issue. But there is another issue that deserves our attention: the idea of contraception as prevention.

I want to be clear that what I mean by contraception as prevention is not that we should be preventing abortions. Once we start saying there are good and bad reasons to have abortions, we are no longer trusting women. Our focus instead should be on preventing unplanned pregnancy. Of course this would also prevent abortions, but we should be supporting contraception because it helps people control when or if they have a child and not solely because it prevents abortions.

This year extremist anti-birth control views reached the mainstream. Four GOP presidential candidates participated in a debate sponsored by Personhood USA and signed a “personhood pledge”. Rick Santorum, a GOP frontrunner, has gone so far as to call birth control dangerous because it enables people to have non-procreative sex. And here in Oklahoma a well-known Representative went on record saying that some forms of birth control kill a person. The previous examples show that although Griswold v. Connecticut established a right to privacy and a right to contraception way back in 1965, these rights are still not secure. Affordable, accessible birth control is still not a reality for all.

This year there were both victories and setbacks in the fight to expand birth control access. Under the Affordable Care Act most women employed in the US will have their birth control fully covered by their insurance and religiously affiliated employers will not be exempt from this. However, this year HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius vetoed the FDA’s recommendation that Plan B be available to teens under 17 without a prescription. Pharmacists also continue to deny adult men and women access to emergency contraception based on misunderstandings about the law or moral objections to the method.

As we celebrate Roe this week, we should remember that making affordable and accessible birth control is just as important as making abortion affordable and accessible. People need both birth control and access to safe abortions to achieve reproductive autonomy.

Susy Prochazka, Thomas Jefferson School of Law

*This post is part of a series written in support of Trust Women Week Silver Ribbon Campaign and the online virtual march from January 20-27. LSRJ is proud to partner with numerous orgs across the country – join the march by sending a message to your lawmakers today! And check back here throughout the week for more posts.

As the 39th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision came and went this weekend, the TJSL chapter was excited to celebrate the decision in a variety of ways. We have a great relationship with The Lawyers Club of San Diego, a local group that focuses on empowering women lawyers, and on Saturday they hosted  an educational luncheon titled “That Was Then, This is Now: Reproductive Rights Update,” highlighting recent changes in reproductive rights and justice legislation. After the panel, we attended a Roe v. Wade Anniversary Dinner, an annual event thrown by the Coalition for Reproductive Choice. This year, the dinner focused on the global reach of RJ issues, featuring speakers discussing local, national, and international fights for reproductive rights. Mary Fjerstad, Director of Medical Affairs & Pharmacovigilance at WomanCare, spoke on the global movement in the fields of reproductive health care.  Kimala Price, Professor, San Diego State University &  Board Member of SisterSong, provided the national perspective by presenting on the anti-choice and racist billboards that have cropped up in Atlanta and New York earlier in 2011. Lastly,  Shukri Adam, Public Health Nurse Consultant Somali & Arabic at the Central Region Public Health Center, spoke of the cultural gaps that female Somali immigrants face in California in regards to their pregnancies.

And the celebrating is far from done! In February, our school is hosting the National Women and the Law Conference, an annual conference that explores the different issues that women face in the legal realm.  Our chapter has established such a presence on campus in the past that this year our faculty advisor was chosen to direct this year’s conference, and she swiftly designated the theme of Reproductive Justice.  Some of our board worked extensively on the Conference committee, performing community outreach and assisting with the hunt for speakers. All this hard work on the part of our members paid off when Sarah Weddington agreed to be the Keynote speaker.

At each initial meeting of the semester, each of our LSRJ board members shares what RJ means to us. We then carry this theme of personalizing the movement throughout the year, with each board member striving to educate and encourage interest in his or her particular niche view of RJ. Roe is incredibly important to all of us, albeit in different ways.  Roe is important to Sarah, our VP of Events, because it expanded access to abortions, making it safer to obtain one. Roe is important to Margaret because it provided an avenue to lessen patriarchal dominance in the family, potentially aiding women in abusive relationships. Roe is important to Thomas as a matter of health law, increasing the autonomy of private medical decisions. To all of us, Roe represents a pivotal decision, advancing each of our respective areas of interest in the RJ movement. 

In the space of one month, our chapter will be celebrating the continuing importance of Roe v. Wade at three amazing events, all of which present different avenues of reproductive justice. While Roe is only one facet of the RJ movement, it illustrates that the law, while never a perfect answer to society’s problems, may nonetheless be used as a tool to shape social justice movements.

Burke Bindbeutel, University of Missouri School of Law

*This post is part of a series written in support of Trust Women Week Silver Ribbon Campaign and the online virtual march from January 20-27. LSRJ is proud to partner with numerous orgs across the country – join the march by sending a message to your lawmakers today! And check back here throughout the week for more posts.

The anniversary of Roe v. Wade reminds our Mizzou LSRJ chapter of what an important milestone the 1973 Supreme Court decision was. In the face of years of entrenched opposition, the Court affirmed a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy. While reproductive justice advocates should cherish the power that the decision granted them, the anniversary also should remind us that Norma McCorvey’s lawsuit was in fact a partial victory. Supreme Court decisions can flip controversial laws, but the most important decisions also inspire backlashes. When reproductive justice is “constitutionalized,” it becomes denatured and defensive. Mizzou LSRJ has been at pains to not be stigmatized as “The Abortion Club,” a state of affairs at least partially due to Roe v. Wade.

The decision interrupted an evolving political discourse, and rested upon an unwieldy compromise. Roe extended Griswold v. Connecticut’s right to privacy to a woman’s decision to abort, but it also stressed that the government had a stake in that decision. Justice Harry Blackmun addressed public safety concerns by discussing fetus “viability,” a slippery term, then and now. The Court did not inform America about when a state’s interest in the potential life of a fetus eclipses a woman’s self-sovereignty.

Here in Missouri, we pioneered the sideways attack on a woman’s right to choose, which the Supreme Court deemed constitutional in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. Rather than a frontal assault on abortion rights, the Missouri legislature in 1988 barred public funds from sponsoring abortion services or even counseling that related to abortion. Before this surprising decision, states had presumed that interfering with abortion rights would have been precluded by Roe. But in Webster, Justice Rehnquist had his revenge. The subsequent Planned Parenthood v. Casey elaborated on just how states can curtail rights not directly but through obstructive measures like parental consent and waiting periods. These later cases exposed the main flaw of Roe: it may have gone some ways towards shoring up individual rights, but mainly it served as a temporary stay on the anti-abortion brigades.

Neal Devins has argued that the compromises of Webster and Casey have struck a workable balance on the abortion issue. But it is not the role of the Supreme Court to author political consensus. And there is little evidence that partial victories have placated the religion-informed anti-Roe factions. Limited abortion rights are still intolerable to that contingent, and reproductive justice advocates cannot be satisfied with the lack of abortion services in 97 percent of Missouri counties, or the arbitrary requirement that doors in abortion clinics must be at least 44 inches wide.

Judicial fiats covering negative rights are not necessarily the best process by which to protect the dignity of a citizenry, argues Robin West. Roe’s deterioration has put RJ advocates on the defensive. The 1973 decision narrowly framed the broad reproductive justice debate. What could have been, and could still be, a conversation about self-sovereignty and the minimal state has become a fight about the appropriate circumstances for pregnancy termination.

We should not have to continually reexamine the penumbras of 1789 in order to obtain the autonomy that underlies the right to an abortion. Instead, we should expect it from our lawmakers, and throw them out on their ear if they don’t acknowledge us. Roe was a precious victory, but the Supreme Court can’t help us help ourselves.

Candace Gibson, University of Utah College of Law

*This post is part of a series written in support of Trust Women Week Silver Ribbon Campaign and the online virtual march from January 20-27. LSRJ is proud to partner with numerous orgs across the country – join the march by sending a message to your lawmakers today! And check back here throughout the week for more posts.

In May 2009, a 17-year-old girl in Naples, Utah, was pregnant.  She was charged with second-degree felony criminal solicitation to commit murder.  Why was she charged? She solicited a man to punch her in the stomach so that she would miscarry.  He accepted $150 from her, took her to the basement of his parent’s house, and kicked her in the stomach five times.  According to the young girl, who is now a young adult, she solicited the assault because her boyfriend threatened to break up with her if she did not terminate her pregnancy.  A juvenile court dismissed her case in 2009, but the Utah Supreme Court this past December reversed their decision.  They reasoned that an assault does not meet the statutory definition of abortion and now this young woman may face criminal penalties for this tragic incident in her life.

I don’t disagree with the Utah Supreme Court in saying that abortion as imagined by our state’s legislators is a medical procedure, although the term “medical” will most likely be co-opted by the Anti-Choice movement to exclude abortions achieved through pharmaceuticals (see the case of an Idaho woman who terminated her own pregnancy by ordering RU486 online and was charged  with a felony).  What I do disagree with is the numerous laws passed by state legislatures to restrict abortion services to the point that Roe v. Wade doesn’t make any impact in the lives of women who need it the most.  Remember what Justice Ginsburg said at the Aspen Institute in 2010, “If the court were to change its mind . . . the only women who would be truly affected are poor women. Because even at the time before Roe, women who wanted abortions could have a safe, legal abortion.”  The problem is, this great Justice has forgotten that most poor women still can’t have abortions because of the Hyde Amendment.

This young woman in Utah should have had the right to decide to be a parent, to give her born child up for adoption, or to have an abortion without emotional abuse from her boyfriend or having to deal with the heinous consequences and obstacles of laws that ultimately regulate abortions out of existence.  As the Guttmacher Institute said in their awesome video, “There will always be women who need abortions.”