July 3, 1990. Three hundred local doctors today declared that they will defy the Illinois legislature and perform illegal abortions on demand. The legislature recently banned most abortions, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, the historic 1973 decision that legalized the procedure.
Allied clergy, led by Rabbi Gary Gerson of Oak Park Temple, issued a statement of their own. It said, “The clergy have been at the forefront since the 60s in the struggle to obtain women’s right to choose abortion and in actually assisting women in need. We fully support and encourage these brave doctors who are putting their lives on the line to provide this very basic right of women.
July 4, 1990. Joseph Scheidler, executive director of the Pro-Life Action League, responded today to the doctors and their allies who promise to defy the new state law banning abortions.
But the third case could give the Court this opportunity. Turnock v. Ragsdale asks this question: to what lengths can the state go to mandate the conditions under which medical treatment takes place? The case involves Illinois regulations–imposed by the Illinois Department of Public Health in 1985 but made unenforceable by a court injunction that a Rockford doctor obtained–that would require an abortion clinic to match the conditions of a hospital outpatient surgical unit. The regulations are viewed by abortion supporters as having been promulgated not to protect the health of patients but to thwart abortions. The procedure used for first trimester abortions, which are the overwhelming majority of those performed, is so simple, it is said, that it can be safely performed by a trained person in a living room.
And for that reason there is now talk of settling Ragsdale out of court. “None of the players in this case want to see Roe reversed,” says Julie Hamos, a consultant for Planned Parenthood with ties to Mayor Daley and the Democratic Party. In 1985, when Ragsdale was filed, “the officials were not in a position to write regulations that we could live with. It was politically safer to write tough regulations and then let it go to the Supreme Court because the Court would always uphold Roe. But that has changed,” says Hamos.
If it isn’t, and Turnock v. Ragsdale proceeds to the Supreme Court, Illinois could soon find it has inflicted on itself a far more tumultuous dispute. Should Roe be reversed, it is more than likely that some statements will ban abortions outright, many states will harshly restrict them, and some few will continue abortion on demand. Illinois was described in Newsweek this summer as a “battleground” state that could follow the first or second path.
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On another issue, 61 percent of those polled by Gallup but only 35 percent polled by the New York Times believed public funds should not be used for abortion, making abortion a surgical procedure outside normal medical practice. And, in fact, no abortions have been performed at Cook County Hospital since County Board Chairman George Dunne outlawed them there in 1982.
