Posted: Monday, November 3, 2008 12:00 am
One of the misleading claims in the election campaign, now mercifully at an end, came from Planned Parenthood and Pro-Choice Oregon. The mailer showed a sweet young face and asked: "How much danger should she face if Gordon Smith gets his way and abortion becomes illegal?"
How could abortion possibly become illegal?
Oregon law does not make it illegal. On the contrary, it implicitly makes it legal by requiring public hospitals to offer the procedure unless they have adopted a policy not to do so and patients are informed of the policy.
When the Supreme Court ruled on this subject in 1973, it said that a ban on abortions violated a woman's privacy rights under the Constitution. Even if it had not ruled the way it did, states were free to make their own laws on the subject, as Oregon had already done in 1969.
As the Oregon Health Division recalled in a 1997 issue paper, "In 1969, the Oregon Abortion Law went into effect, legalizing abortions performed by licensed medical providers in a hospital setting."
Memory is an admittedly poor guide in this respect, but it does not recall any vast amount of abortion controversy coming from the Capitol in 1969. When he addressed the legislature that January, Gov. Tom McCall mentioned the subject in only one sentence in a series of injustices he wanted fixed. "Women are discriminated against," he said, "by abortion laws that are callous tools of shame instead of useful social instruments."
The legislature responded by changing the law, but Oregon was not alone. A newspaper report from 1969 said other states with legalized abortion included Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, North Carolina, Georgia, Maryland, Kansas and New Mexico. In other words, some 40 years ago, states were legalizing abortion with none of the bitter controversy that began after the Supreme Court unwisely got into the act in 1973.
It would take a law change in Oregon to make abortion illegal, a law change not even remotely likely even if the Supreme Court changed its mind in some future case. (hh)