United States v. Vuitch

Vuitch was the first decision to rule on the constitutionality of anti-abortion laws. In its aftermath, abortion rights advocates realized that the mere absence of anti-abortion laws was insufficient protection for women. Women would need legislation or court decisions to win their right to end a pregnancy.

In 1971, two years before the historic Roe v. Wade legalized a woman's right to end her pregnancy, a U.S. district court heard the case of Dr. Milan Vuitch. Vuitch was a physician charged with the crime of inducing a medical abortion in violation of the District of Columbia Code. This law, unchanged since 1901, made abortion a crime unless "done . . . for the preservation of the mother's life or health" and under the direction of a licensed physician. The statute was typical of anti-abortion laws in many states.

Vuitch was a Serbian youth who had studied medicine in Hungary before immigrating to the United States in the mid-1950s. In 1962, shortly after receiving his medical license, Vuitch started performing abortions in Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. At a time when abortion was illegal in most states, Vuitch was one of few physicians willing to risk his profession and liberty by taking on referrals from the budding abortion rights movement. By 1964, he was performing abortions on a full-time basis, eventually ten to 20 each week.

Over the next five years, police tried repeatedly to shut down Vuitch's practice, arresting him more than 12 times. However, except for one conviction in Montgomery County, Maryland, on appeal in 1971, courts found Vuitch innocent.

On 21 April 1971, a court indicted the 54-year-old physician for violating the District of Columbia Code. In a momentous breakthrough for abortion rights advocates, Federal District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell declared the law unconstitutionally vague, and dismissed the indictments against Vuitch without waiting for a trial. Gesell stated that under this law, "a physician would not know if he was committing a crime when he performed an abortion, because a jury might later disagree with his opinion that the mother's health required it. [Thus] the doctors' problem was particularly acute because the burden was on them to prove that the abortion was justified."

This decision left the district without any law on abortion. The public hospital on which most of the district's poor residents relied, D.C. General, soon stopped giving abortions. Private hospitals were similarly restrictive. The National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), in conjunction with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), sued D.C. General Hospital twice, obtaining two court orders that forced the hospital to perform more abortions.

In this atmosphere, the Justice Department appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Attorneys argued that Vuitch had "performed abortions for any woman who desired one, without considering [if] the woman's health [was in jeopardy]."