Court Rejects Companion Case to Roe V. Wade Seeking to Reverse Abortion Ruling

ABC News
Court Rejects Roe V. Wade Companion Case
Court Rejects Companion Case to Roe V. Wade Seeking to Reverse Abortion Ruling
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned aside the case of Sandra Cano, one of the women behind the legalization of abortion, who had sought to reverse the victory she won 33 years ago.

Cano says she never wanted an abortion and that her difficult early life resulted in her becoming the anonymous plaintiff in Doe v. Bolton, the lesser-known case which the justices ruled on the same day in 1973 as the landmark Roe v. Wade.

"We're very disappointed that the Supreme Court has not decided to protect women and children from the harm of abortion," said Allan Parker, one of Cano's attorneys. "The court has aborted the normal regulation of medicine in this area."

Cano says she was a 22-year-old victim of an abusive husband and that her children were in foster care when she sought legal assistance in getting a divorce and in getting her children back.

She said an aggressive attorney pushed her into the abortion case.

"What I received was something I never requested the legal right to abort my child," Cano said in an affidavit six years ago.

Her current lawyers' legal brief says that despite advances in medicine, science and technology, the justices have "frozen abortion law based on obsolete 1973 assumptions and prevented the normal regulation of the practice of medicine."

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in January that neither it nor a U.S. District Court had the authority to reverse the Supreme Court's decisions in Doe v. Bolton or Roe v. Wade.