Just as opposing
activists reinterpreted Roe’s holding,
abortion providers in the 1970s had to interpret an increasingly complex body
of law. At clinics like Reproductive Health Services in St. Louis, a number of
different stakeholders had to interpret both constitutional and statutory rules
governing abortion. Attorneys representing the clinic worked primarily to
guarantee that the clinic did not obviously run afoul of any valid law and to
challenge any questionable law in court. Providers themselves had different
goals in interpreting these laws. Those like Judith Widdicombe, the founder of Reproductive
Health Services and a NARAL leader, wanted to convey to women what they could
demand of the medical and legal establishment. Providers at Reproductive Health
Services also interpreted abortion law with the intention of building political
support for their practice. Patients received an explanation of what abortion
rights ought to be, suggesting that the Constitution did not impose any
meaningful limits on reproductive autonomy. The clinic also provided information
about how to become involved in the movement to defend those rights. Finally,
patients often had to make their own decisions about the legality and morality
of their own decisions. The archived papers from Reproductive Health Services
make clear that women often asked about the laws governing their decisions,
folding questions of legality into an already complex moral decision.
As the experience of
Reproductive Health Services in the 1970s suggests, lay people as well as
lawyers forged the meaning of abortion laws outside the courtroom. Often, in
the clinic, different stakeholders interpreted abortion laws in varying ways
for different purposes. Attorneys representing the clinic exhibited consistent
cautiousness, hewing closely to the courts’ articulations of abortion law.
Providers, by contrast, were deeply skeptical about the courts and the rights
they protected. For Widdicombe, Roe and
its progeny served as symbols available to patients seeking reassurance,
empowerment, or a reason to become politically active. For this reason, providers
tended to stray quite far from what the Court had said, reinterpreting Roe and subsequent decisions to reflect
rights that providers believed the Constitution ought to protect irrespective
of what the Court said. In practice, providers often served as the primary
interpreters of constitutional law in the clinic, informing staff, trainees,
and patients about what the Constitution means. Something similar appears to
have been true of the Birthright Clinic in St. Louis, founded in 1971.
Abortion
providers, crisis-pregnancy counselors, attorneys, and patients helped to
determine the abortion law outside the courts. Certainly, formal law
shaped these exchanges, as some form of judicial intervention always remained a
possibility. Just the same, in the
1970s, the clinics themselves created a substantial and largely understudied
body of abortion law.
