Thursday, December 29, 2011
Self-induced Abortions Raise New Issues in National Abortion Debate
Newsweek: The Next Roe v. Wade?: Jennie McCormack's Abortion Battle, by Nancy Hass:
Jennie McCormack was arrested for terminating her pregnancy with an abortion pill. The case that could transform the reproduction wars.
The last thing on Jennie Linn McCormack’s mind when she realized she was pregnant was that she might, with a single telephone call, upend the vitriolic national debate on abortion.
All she thought about was how it would be impossible for her to take care of another baby. Surviving, barely, on the $250 of monthly child support for one of her three kids, the unemployed, unmarried 32-year-old also knew she didn’t have the more than $500 she’d need for the two-and-a-half-hour trip from her bare-bones rental in Pocatello, Idaho, to Salt Lake City, the closest city with a clinic willing to terminate a pregnancy. She had no computer, no car, no one to take care of her 2-year-old—and like Idaho, Utah had a waiting period for abortions, which meant she’d have to make two round trips. So early this past January, she made the call that may alter history and turn Jennie McCormack into Jane Roe’s unlikely successor: she asked her sister in Mississippi to buy RU-486, the so-called abortion pill, over the Internet and send it to her. The cost: about $200. . . .
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/reproductive_rights/2011/12/could-self-induced-abortions-lead-to-the-next-roe-v-wade.html