Obama Wrote 1990 Harvard Law Review Case Comment on Fetal-Maternal Tort Actions

Via Politico:

[A]n unsigned — and previously unattributed — 1990 article unearthed by Politico offers a glimpse at Obama's views on abortion policy and the law during his student days....

The six-page summary, tucked into the third volume of the year's Harvard Law Review, considers the charged, if peripheral, question of whether fetuses should be able to file lawsuits against their mothers. Obama's answer, like most courts': No.

Obama agreed with the Illinois Supreme Court that such lawsuits are bad public policy because they both threaten women's autonomy and fail to promote fetal health.  He wrote:

The case highlights the unsuitability of fetal-maternal tort suits as vehicles for promoting fetal health; it also indicates the dangers such causes of action present to women's autonomy, and the need for a constitutional framework to constrain future attempts to expand "fetal rights."

...Expanded access to prenatal education and heath care facilities will far more likely serve the very real state interest in preventing increasing numbers of children from being born in to lives of pain and despair.

You can read the whole case comment via a link on the Tax Prof Blog.