Beal v. Doe - Impact

Beal, along with its two companion cases, left in its wake a growing uncertainty as to laws governing abortion in a public arena. To abortion-rights advocates, the cases were judged as a setback because they failed to extend the practice of abortion (and as some argued, actually prevented poor women from receiving abortions); but opponents of abortion gained little from the cases either. Beal and its companions simply helped to establish the fact of abortion's legality as decided four years earlier in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, and left open the question of public funding. The Court affirmed its position in Harris v. McRae (1980), in which it upheld the so-called Hyde Amendment to Title XIX, which forbade the use of federal funds for non-therapeutic abortions.