The “pro-life” side won a major victory from the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals today, but the biggest victor was the Constitution.
Eleven of the 17 judges participating in the decision ruled that an Ohio law keeping state funds from organizations that perform nontherapeutic abortions does not run afoul of the constitutional abortion privilege created under the 1973 Roe v. Wade case and its progeny. The judges noted that the law still permits women to obtain abortions, but just not to force taxpayers to handle the bill.
For the majority, Judge Jeffrey Sutton wrote that tax-funded state governments are under “no obligation to pay for a woman’s abortion. Case after case establishes that a government may refuse to subsidize abortion services.”
The point here is that the “right” to an abortion delineated by Roe belongs to the woman seeking one, not the clinic performing it. Flatly: “Medical centers do not have a constitutional right to offer abortions.” Denying tax-financing for the clinic does not place any legally recognized burden on women who might be seeking the operation.
Moreover: “The State may choose to subsidize what it wishes—whether abortion services or adoption services, whether stores that sell guns or stores that don’t.” That is what representative democracy is all about: the authority of the people, through their elected representatives, to choose what laws to implement and how their tax money will be spent.
There was a time, before government became so ubiquitous and invasive, when a conclusion like this one would have amounted to basic common sense. If the emotionally fraught subject of abortion were taken out of the equation, the result would have been obvious.
The Constitution is not a document specifying public appropriations, and freedom is not the same as compulsory accommodation. Thank goodness that nearly two-thirds of the 6th Circuit judges recognized those distinctions.
