National Right to Life Committee

THE NATIONAL RIGHT TO LIFE Committee is the most powerful pro—life organization in the United States, working through education and legislation mainly against abortion, human cloning, healthcare reform, euthanasia, and related issues.

The association was created in 1973 in response to a U.S. Supreme Court decision released on January 22 of that year, legalizing the practice of human abortion in all the federal states through the entire nine months of pregnancy. Before that Supreme Court case—Roe v. Wade—the abortion debate had been confined to the legislatures of the states, 17 of which had legalized abortion under certain circumstances and 33 of which had voted to continue to protect human life from conception onward.

A pregnant single woman (Roe) brought a class action lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Texas criminal abortion laws, which proscribed procuring or attempting an abortion except on medical advice for the purpose of saving the mother's life. A licensed physician (Hallford), who had two state abortion prosecutions pending against him, was allowed to arbitrate. A childless married couple (the Does) separately attacked the laws, basing their alleged injury on the future possibilities of contraceptive failure pregnancy, unpre—paredness for parenthood, and impairment of the wife's health. A three—judge District Court, which consolidated the action, held that Roe and Hallford [Page 368]and the members of their classes had standing to sue and presented justiciable controversy.

The court declared the abortion statutes void as being vague and overbroadly infringing individuals' Ninth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. The court ruled the Does' complaint not justiciable. Appellants directly appealed to the court on the injunctive rulings, and the appellee cross—appealed from the District Court's grant of declaratory relief to Roe and Hallford.

Roe v. Wade is one of the most controversial and important cases in U.S. Supreme Court history. The focal holding of this case was that abortion is allowed for any reason up until the point at which the fetus is able to live outside the mother's body, even if with artificial aid. This condition (called fetus viability) is usually fixed between 24 and 28 weeks of pregnancy, and the court held that abortion after viability must still be accessible when required to ensure a woman's health.