A woman’s right to choose to have an abortion has been constitutionally protected since 1973 when, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruled that the state may not wholly restrict a woman’s choice to terminate a pregnancy. In Roe, the Court invoked the 14th Amendment’s imprecise guarantee of personal liberty as grounds for the right to terminate a pregnancy without excessive interference. In later cases, specifically Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992), the Court clarified that mere possession of the right to abortion is insufficient to guarantee personal liberty– abortion seekers must be able to exercise their right, free of “undue burdens.” According to Casey, statutes which pose an undue burden to the right to an abortion violate the Constitution. This thesis considers whether the burdens placed on abortion seekers in Florida are constitutional or a violation of the 14th Amendment guarantee to equal protection under the law.
In order to measure the diversity in burdens faced by abortion-seekers, I collect data on all 67 counties across Florida, guided by the Court’s definition of relevant variables for the purpose of abortion access: the number of providers, the availability of a judicial bypass of restrictions, and the physical distance to clinics. This data is combined in a single statistic, which is called the Unde Burden Score. There is tremendous variation in the score across Florida counties, posing a challenge to the promise of equal protection under the law and for those attempting to exercise their reproductive rights. The findings suggest that Florida’s intrastate access to abortion is incredibly contingent on geographic location, suggesting that the equal right to abortion exists in theory, but not in practice.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/45177 |
| Date | 25 September 2022 |
| Creators | Luque, Manuela |
| Contributors | Mattioli, Lauren L., Piston, Spencer S. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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