Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v. Danforth

Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v. Danforth was, as the Court announced in its opening comments on the case, a "logical and anticipated corollary to" Roe v. Wade (1973) and Doe v. Bolton (1973), two cases that had legalized abortion. Not long after those decisions, the Court reviewed a case in which a 1969 Missouri abortion law had come under constitutional challenge. A panel of three federal judges in the Western District of Missouri, in an unreported decision, declared the Missouri statutes unconstitutional. The Supreme Court affirmed this decision. Meanwhile, a number of states, Missouri among them, sought to enact tougher abortion laws in order to curtail the number of situations in which abortion might be permissible. In June of 1974, the Missouri General Assembly passed House Bill 1211 (which the Court designated as "act"), and the state governor signed it into law on 14 June 1974.

The act set a number of stipulations regarding abortion, and three days after its passage, it was challenged in the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. Leading the list of plaintiffs was Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri, a non-profit corporation that maintained an abortion clinic in Columbia, Missouri. David Hall and Michael Freiman, both physicians who regularly performed abortions, joined Planned Parenthood in that action, which they brought "on behalf of the entire class consisting of duly licensed physicians and surgeons" involved, or interested in being involved, in performing abortions; and "on behalf of the entire class consisting of their patients desiring the termination of pregnancy, all within the State of Missouri." According to their suit, the Missouri statute deprived themselves and their patients of various constitutional rights, including "the right to privacy in the physician-patient relationship"; the physician's "right to practice medicine according to the highest standards of medical practice"; a woman's right to decide whether or not she should have children; her "right to life due to the inherent risk involved in childbirth"; physicians' right to give medical advice, and patients' right to receive it; the patients' right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment, in this case such punishment being "coercing them to bear each pregnancy they conceive"; and the physician's right to due process of law under the Fourteenth Amendment.

In all, the case challenged some nine provisions in the Missouri statute, some of which the district court held as unconstitutional. With regard to those parts deemed constitutional, the people bringing suit appealed; likewise the state of Missouri, in a subordinate legal action designated as Danforth v. Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri, appealed the lower court's rulings against certain of its state laws. On the side of the appellants, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America Inc. filed briefs of amici curiae. Likewise the United States Catholic Conference, Lawyers for Life Inc., and Missouri Nurses for Life filed briefs on behalf of the appellees.

The Court's ruling in Danforth was a complex one, divided into eight parts. A majority agreed on all eight, but four--White, Burger, Rehnquist, and Stevens-- dissented on a number of the parts. Beginning its ruling, the Court noted that under Roe, it had established the existence of a "right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourth Amendment's concept of personal liberty . . . or . . . in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people." It had "emphatically rejected," however, the notion that "the woman's right is absolute and that she is entitled to terminate her pregnancy at whatever time, in whatever way, and for whatever reason she alone chooses." Rather, state interests must be taken into consideration as well. The Court tied the permissibility of state regulations to three stages of pregnancy: (1) a period approximating the first trimester or three months, when the state could not interfere at all in the decision to abort; (2) a period in which the state could "reasonably regulate the abortion procedure to preserve and protect maternal health"; and (3) a stage when the fetus is determined to be viable, "a point purposefully left flexible for professional determination," at which time the state could "regulate an abortion to protect the life of the fetus and even . . . proscribe abortion except where it is necessary . . . for the life or health of the mother."

The Court then turned to the various challenged statutes. The first of these was section 7, which declared that if an infant survived an abortion not performed for reasons of health or to save life, that child would be taken from its parents and declared a ward of the state. Given the fact that this particular statute had nothing to do with the physicians or Planned Parenthood, the Court ruled that the appellants lacked standing, and declined to make any judgment whatever on the statute itself.

Next it turned to the challenging question of viability, which Missouri defined in section 2 (2) as "that stage of fetal development when the life of the unborn child may be continued indefinitely outside the womb by natural or artificial life- supportive systems." In Roe, the Court had loosely defined "viable" as the point at which the fetus was "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid," and had noted that this usually falls around the seventh month or the twenty-eighth week of pregnancy. "In any event," wrote Justice Blackmun for the Court, "we agree with the District Court that it is not the proper function of the legislature or the courts to place viability, which essentially is a medical concept, at a specific point in the gestation period." Therefore the Court concluded that section 2 (2) did not overstep the limits on state regulation established in Roe.