January 22, 2002: ACLU-TN Celebrates Roe v Wade Anniversary and Calls for Renewed Vigilance

For Immediate Release
Tuesday, January 22, 2002

For more Information, contact
Hedy Weinberg 615-320-7142

Statement by ACLU-TN Executive Director Hedy Weinberg

As we celebrate the 29th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade and the fundamental right to choose, the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee (ACLU-TN) urges renewed vigilance as attacks on reproductive freedom increase in Tennessee and across the country.

In the years since Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing abortion, being “pro-choice” has come to mean more than supporting the legality of abortion. Today, it means ensuring that the full range of reproductive freedoms extends to all women – regardless of class, race, age, or geographic region. Being pro-choice is about preserving the fundamental liberties of freedom, privacy, and self-determination on all fronts.

And yet from the Tennessee General Assembly to Washington D.C., pro-choice advocates are seeing attacks on these reproductive freedom rights.

In Tennessee, ACLU-TN is vigorously lobbying against a dangerous constitutional amendment which would exempt abortion rights from the privacy protection guaranteed by the Tennessee Constitution. This anti-choice legislative initiative is a direct result of successful litigation in which ACLU-TN represented Planned Parenthood of Middle Tennessee in our challenge to Tennessee’s restrictive abortion statute.

On September 5, 2000, eight years after the lawsuit was filed, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that the State Constitution guarantees a women’s right to privacy regarding her right to seek an abortion. Ironically, the amendment’s supporters are those legislators who typically support states’ rights. Yet this initiative effectively eliminates the Tennessee Constitution as the independent interpreter of state law.

Today, with an avowed anti-choice President and Attorney General, a clear anti-choice majority in the House and a Senate dominated by anti-choice lawmakers, the threat to reproductive freedom is as great as it ever was. This unrelenting hostility to reproductive freedom places the right to reproductive choice in grave danger.

US Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun wrote, “Few decisions are more personal and intimate, more properly private, or more basic to individual dignity and autonomy, than a woman’s decision whether to end her pregnancy. A woman’s right to make that choice freely is fundamental.”

ACLU-TN echoes Justice Blackmun’s words and rededicates itself to the defense of women’s reproductive freedom to ensure that every woman can make informed, meaningful decisions about her reproductive health free from government interference.