Justice Anthony Kennedy gave huge currency to the argument that women cannot be trusted with the decision to abort in his majority opinion in a 2007 decision banning a type of late-term abortion. Relying on yet more equivocal data, Kennedy lavished concern on women who regret their abortions, whose "distress" may someday lead to "severe depression and loss of esteem." It's a long road indeed from Roe when a woman's private choices about her future and her body are subordinated to Justice Kennedy's 20/20 psychological hindsight.

Which brings us to disturbing new regulations proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services; rules that ostensibly seek to protect the "right of conscience" of pharmacists and other health workers who don't want to participate in abortions. As William Saletan has argued, the current draft regulations--while an improvement upon the original---draw no explicit distinction between medical workers who refuse to provide abortions and those who oppose dispensing contraception. In these ambiguous cases the decision-maker may well be the medical service provider herself, depending on what her own conscience permits. If these regulations go into effect, not only can your pharmacist refuse to give you the morning-after pill, he might deny you the month-before pill as well. At which point it's not just the judges, state legislatures, Supreme Court Justices from Sacramento, or doctors who know better than women what's best for women. It's the pharmacist behind the counter, too.

Every time someone else in the decision-making chain gets the power to insert him or herself and conscience between a woman and her fetus, the range of women's choices contracts. But women need not defer to anyone's "better" judgment when they pull the lever at the voting booth.

John McCain and Sarah Palin must pretend their daughters can make an autonomous decision about abortion with a little wise counsel. Yet both have also made it clear that they dream of an America in which women (like Bristol Palin or Meghan McCain) will have a decision to make about an unintended pregnancy, but only one choice.

© 2008