Volume 37, Number 5 · March 29, 1990
The Fight Over Teen-age Abortion
By Sue M. Halpern
Last July in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services a severely fractured Court upheld a Missouri statute that prohibited abortions in publicly funded hospitals. The decision limited yet did not overturn Roe v. Wade. Still it left open the possibility that the Court might do just that if given a better instrument. Attention then turned to the next set of abortion cases it would consider. Or, rather, attention turned to one of the three cases on the Court's docket, Turnock v. Ragsdale, which challenged an Illinois statute requiring outpatient clinics that provide abortions during the first three months of pregnancy to have their operating rooms meet expensive hospital standards. These standards, which the lower court found to be without medical justification, would put many clinics out of business and force the others to charge fees that many women would have difficulty paying, if they could pay at all. It would thus seriously curtail the right to abortion. As Ronald Dworkin wrote in these pages:
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