Doe v. Bolton

410 U.S. 179, 93 S. Ct. 739, 35 L. Ed. 2d 201, 1973 U.S. LEXIS 112
CourtSupreme Court of the United States
DecidedFebruary 26, 1973
Docket70-40
StatusPublished
Cited by1,429 cases

This text of 410 U.S. 179 (Doe v. Bolton) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of the United States primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179, 93 S. Ct. 739, 35 L. Ed. 2d 201, 1973 U.S. LEXIS 112 (1973).

Opinions

Mr. Justice Blackmun

delivered the opinion of the Court.

In this appeal, the criminal abortion statutes recently enacted in Georgia are challenged on constitutional grounds. The statutes are §§ 26-1201 through 26-1203 of the State’s Criminal Code, formulated by Georgia Laws, 1968 Session, pp. 1249, 1277-1280. In Roe v. Wade, ante, p. 113, we today have struck down, as constitutionally defective, the Texas criminal abortion statutes that are representative of provisions long in effect [182]*182in a majority of our States. The Georgia legislation, however, is different and merits separate consideration.

I

The statutes in question are reproduced as Appendix A, post, p. 202.1 As the appellants acknowledge,2 the 1968 statutes are patterned upon the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code, § 230.3 (Proposed Official Draft, 1962), reproduced as Appendix B, post, p. 205. The ALI proposal has served as the model for recent legislation in approximately one-fourth of our States.3 The new Georgia provisions replaced statutory law that had been in effect for more than 90 years. Georgia Laws 1876, No. 130, § 2, at 113.4 The predecessor statute paralleled [183]*183the Texas legislation considered in Roe v. Wade, supra, and made all abortions criminal except those necessary “to preserve the life” of the pregnant woman. The new statutes have not been tested on constitutional grounds in the Georgia state courts.

Section 26-1201, with a referenced exception, makes abortion a crime, and § 26-1203 provides that a person convicted of that crime shall be punished by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than 10 years. Section 26-1202 (a) states the exception and removes from § 1201’s definition of criminal abortion, and thus makes noncriminal, an abortion “performed by a physician duly licensed” in Georgia when, “based upon his best clinical judgment ... an abortion is necessary because:

“(1) A continuation of the pregnancy would endanger the life of the pregnant woman or would seriously and permanently injure her health; or
“(2) The fetus would very likely be born with a grave, permanent, and irremediable mental or physical defect; or
“(3) The pregnancy resulted from forcible or statutory rape.” 5

Section 26-1202 also requires, by numbered subdivisions of its subsection (b), that, for an abortion to be author[184]*184ized or performed as a noncriminal procedure, additional conditions must be fulfilled. These are (1) and (2) residence of the woman in Georgia; (3) reduction to writing of the performing physician’s medical judgment that an abortion is justified for one or more of the reasons specified by § 26-1202 (a), with written concurrence in that judgment by at least two other Georgia-licensed physicians, based upon their separate personal medical examinations of the woman; (4) performance of the abortion in a hospital licensed by the State Board of Health and also accredited by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals; (5) advance approval by an abortion committee of not less than three members of the hospital’s staff; (6) certifications in a rape situation; and (7), (8), and (9) maintenance and confidentiality of records. There is a provision (subsection (c)) for judicial determination of the legality of a proposed abortion on petition of the judicial circuit law officer or of a close relative, as therein defined, of the unborn child, and for expeditious hearing of that petition. There is also a provision (subsection (e)) giving a hospital the right not to admit an abortion patient and giving any physician and any hospital employee or staff member the right, on moral or religious grounds, not to participate in the procedure.

II

On April 16, 1970, Mary Doe,6 23 other individuals (nine described as Georgia-licensed physicians, seven as nurses registered in the State, five as clergymen, and two as social workers), and two nonprofit Georgia corporations that advocate abortion reform instituted this federal action in the Northern District of Georgia against the State’s attorney general, the district attorney of [185]*185Fulton County, and the chief of police of the city of Atlanta. The plaintiffs sought a declaratory judgment that the Georgia abortion statutes were unconstitutional in their entirety. They also sought injunctive relief restraining the defendants and their successors from enforcing the statutes.

Mary Doe alleged:

(1) She was a 22-year-old Georgia citizen, married, and nine weeks'pregnant. She had three living children. The two older ones had been placed in a foster home because of Doe’s poverty and inability to care for them. The youngest, born July 19, 1969, had been placed for adoption. Her husband had recently abandoned her and she was forced to live with her indigent parents and their eight children. She and her husband, however, had become reconciled. He was a construction worker employed only sporadically. She had been a mental patient at the State Hospital. She had been advised that an abortion could be performed on her with less danger to her health than if she gave birth to the child she was carrying. She would be unable to care for or support the new child.

(2) On March 25, 1970, she applied to the Abortion Committee of Grady Memorial Hospital, Atlanta, for a therapeutic abortion under § 26-1202. Her application was denied 16 days later, on April 10, when she was eight weeks pregnant, on the ground that her situation was not one described in § 26-1202 (a).7

(3) Because her application was denied, she was forced either to relinquish “her right to decide when and how many children she will bear” or to seek an abortion that was illegal under the Georgia statutes. This invaded her [186]*186rights of privacy and liberty in matters related to family, marriage, and sex, and deprived her of the right to choose whether to bear children. This was a violation of rights guaranteed her by the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments. The statutes also denied her equal protection and procedural due process and, because they were unconstitutionally vague, deterred hospitals and doctors from performing abortions. She sued “on her own behalf and on behalf of all others similarly situated.”

The other plaintiffs alleged that the Georgia statutes “chilled and deterred” them from practicing their respective professions and deprived them of rights guaranteed by the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments. These plaintiffs also purported to sue on their own behalf and on behalf of others similarly situated.

A three-judge district court was convened. An offer of proof as to Doe’s identity was made, but the court deemed it unnecessary to receive that proof. The case was then tried on the pleadings and interrogatories.

The District Court, per curiam, 319 F. Supp. 1048 (ND Ga. 1970), held that all the plaintiffs had standing but that only Doe presented a justiciable controversy. On the merits, the court concluded that the limitation in the Georgia statute of the “number of reasons for which an abortion may be sought,” id., at 1056, improperly restricted Doe’s rights of privacy articulated in Griswold

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
410 U.S. 179, 93 S. Ct. 739, 35 L. Ed. 2d 201, 1973 U.S. LEXIS 112, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/doe-v-bolton-scotus-1973.