WASHINGTON -- As the nation approaches the 30th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade on Wednesday, the reasoning that the Supreme Court used to define a constitutional right to abortion is facing sharp and novel challenges.
With the growth of embryonic research, abortion opponents are finding more opportunities to upgrade the embryo's legal status. Lawmakers and regulators are already considering whether the human embryo and fetus deserve special legal protections in areas as diverse as patent protection and homicide law.
Activists hope that at the end of this road, abortion itself will fall. Although they have spent the last three decades pursuing laws to restrict or limit abortions, they now hope to strike at the core of the 1973 Supreme Court decision that said the unborn generally gain rights only upon birth and women may choose abortion without restriction during the first phases of pregnancy.
"In as many areas as we can, we want to put on the books that the embryo is a person," said Samuel B. Casey, executive director of the Christian Legal Society, a public interest group in Virginia whose clients include abortion opponents. "That sets the stage for a jurist to acknowledge that human beings at any stage of development deserve protection -- even protection that would trump a woman's interest in terminating a pregnancy."
Jeffrey Bell, a Republican political strategist in Washington, said debate is refocusing on what matters most to antiabortion groups: the value of human life.
"Parental notification rules don't really prohibit anything. They don't ban the act of abortion," Bell said. "But a cloning ban -- this is saying that something should be illegal. And if taking [unborn] human life became illegal, that would be a breakthrough. Since Roe, no one has been able to do that."
In debates driven primarily by scientific and medical advances in embryo development, policymakers are being forced to confront questions about the embryo and fetus, drawing new energy and emotion to the debate over their status.
Last week, New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey announced that he would sign a bill endorsing the use of human embryos in stem cell research. In Washington, President Bush's bioethics panel debated the point at which a human embryo becomes an individual being. And in Nebraska, state Sen. Mike Foley filed a bill to allow wrongful death lawsuits involving the loss of an unborn child, an action he said was partly aimed at undermining the logic of Roe.
