Word: states
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Rhetoric aside, the decision in Webster revealed that there are now four Justices who want to keep the right to abortion intact, four who would like to overturn Roe and give the states wider discretion to restrict abortion, and one -- Justice O'Connor -- who cannot be placed with certainty in either camp. In past abortion cases, O'Connor has said she would allow state restrictions as long as they are not "unduly burdensome." But, abortion-rights advocates say, she has yet to meet a burden she considers to be undue. Among those that have passed O'Connor's standard: requiring...
...never vote for an office-seeker who advocates restricting a woman's right to obtain an abortion. The poll also found that 57% do not believe that the court should overturn its ruling in Roe, while 61% disagree with the decision in the Webster case. Only 31% favor new state laws restricting access to abortion, while 57% oppose such limitations...
...removing the debate from the judiciary to the state legislatures, the two sides may be able to pull each other, grudgingly, into the great middle where the TIME poll and other surveys show most Americans reside, tolerating for better or worse the ambiguity the issue carries with it. A quiet majority favor choice in the first stages of pregnancy but are nonetheless deeply troubled. Many intuitively recognize that as a fetus grows, so does society's obligation to protect it. Precisely where that obligation begins or ends remains the imponderable. But whoever can capture those still groping for an answer...
...disaster facing America's state legislators, and potentially its national legislators, is that they may have to address an issue of public policy on which many of their constituents have strong and irreconcilable opinions. This they hate to do and are skilled at avoiding, even though it is what they are paid for. They would far rather pass laws against burning the flag. But there is no Gramm-Rudman-style automatic chopping machinery that can resolve the abortion issue. Nor can abortion be finessed by handing it over to a commission of distinguished experts (although this ploy will undoubtedly...
Before Roe, abortion was slowly being legalized, state by state, under varying rules, amid moderate controversy. Roe told abortion supporters and opponents alike that it was all or nothing at all, a Manichaean battle in which compromise was impossible. A generation of social-issue conservatives was politicized and mobilized. As a result, today's Republican Party officially endorses a human-life amendment that would not merely return the abortion issue to the states but would constitutionally ban abortion except to save the mother's life...