DN Editorial: 40 YEARS LATER

THE ROE V. WADE decision - announced 40 years ago Tuesday - is the best-known Supreme Court decision: When asked, Americans name it eight times more than the second-place

Brown v. Board of Education

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That's not surprising given the fact that, unlike most other Supreme Court decisions, this one's anniversary is regularly marked, as it was Tuesday, by demonstrations, pro and con.

What some people may not remember is that Roe - the case of a Texas woman (whose real name, we learned much later, was Norma McCorvey) - was only one of several cases making their way through the federal justice system, representing a decades-long national movement.

The drive to decriminalize abortion began as a public-health issue and as an issue of social justice. And although the four decades since Roe have seen virulent (and sometimes violent) debates over women's rights and states' rights, "judicial activism" and the separation of church and state, legal abortion still remains a public-health issue - and an issue of social justice.

In their book Before Roe v. Wade, authors Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel point out that many of the early actors in the movement to legalize abortion were doctors who regularly saw the damage done to women (or damage women did to themselves) in their desperation to end unwanted pregnancies.

The authors note a strong social-justice component as well: Wealthy or well-connected women often could find doctors to recommend therapeutic abortions. Women without those resources could not. When a few states legalized abortions, women who could afford to travel could get them. Women without money could not.

Greenhouse and Siegel also document that it was Richard Nixon's attempt to attract Catholic Democratic voters to his side in 1972 that began the Republican Party's wide swing from support of legalized abortion and contraception to its current extreme opposition. Forty years later, that extreme opposition no doubt made it easier for President Obama to defeat his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney.

Obama presumably will fill any vacancies on the Supreme Court with justices who will uphold Roe v. Wade, so it likely will remain the law of the land for the near future, and that apparently will suit the overwhelming majority of Americans just fine: A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll released Tuesday found that only 24 percent of the country wants Roe overturned.

But safe, legal abortion is still a public-health issue because it remains an issue of social justice: Low-income women are five times more likely to have unplanned pregnancies than their wealthier sisters. And an onslaught of legislation in many states - including Pennsylvania - disproportionately affects their access to abortion.

The result: Although last year, there were 22 abortion providers in Pennsylvania, now there are only 13 places where a woman can have the procedure. (An additional four providers offer abortion pills.)

Roadblocks to legal and safe abortion is a major public-health issue in Pennsylvania. Our legislators, and our governor, should be held accountable for erecting them.