NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado : Get the Facts

In the 1973 Roe v. Wade case, the U.S. Supreme Court held that states cannot proscribe women's constitutionally protected right to terminate their pregnancies. Roe held that while states could regulate abortion, any regulations must recognize women’s right to terminate their pregnancies prior to fetal viability (at the time approximated at 24-28 weeks) and include provisions that allowed abortion procedures to preserve the health and life of a woman at any stage of pregnancy.

Despite divisive attacks by anti-choice groups, Roe remains the law of the land and most recently has been upheld in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Stenberg v. Carhart. Casey struck down numerous unconstitutional restrictions on the right to an abortion and reaffirmed the requirement that state regulations of abortion include provisions recognizing the right to an abortion to preserve the health and life of a pregnant woman. In examining state restrictions on late abortion procedures, Carhart again reaffirmed the finding that state regulations must contain provisions allowing for abortions to preserve the life or health of a pregnant woman.

Attempts to ban abortion at any stage of pregnancy and without due regard to the life and health of the pregnant woman do nothing to reduce the need for abortion -- unintended pregnancies and complicating factors that contribute to fetal anomalies or imperil the life or health of a pregnant woman. Rather than trusting women to make personal, private health care decisions in consultation with their doctors and families and in keeping with their own religious and moral beliefs, lawmakers should promote policies that provide women and their families with the tools they need to prevent unintended pregnancy and promote safe, healthy children if they choose to carry their pregnancies to term.

The primary goal of those who oppose abortion is the overturn of Roe v. Wade. However, without control of the Supreme Court and unable to muster support for a constitutional ban on abortion, anti-choice forces have resorted to an incremental strategy. Instead of a broad assault on the right to choose, they come at Roe from the fringes, enacting an ever-increasing number of state restrictions on a woman's right to choose and blocking access to abortion wherever and however they can. Waiting periods, informed consent requirements, bans on public funding, insurance prohibitions, unnecessary clinic regulations — these laws are not designed to protect women. Instead, they are designed to deter women from choosing abortion and to make it more difficult and burdensome to obtain for those that do.