The history of abortion access in Tennessee can be viewed as a pendulum, swinging back and forth over the years.
Abortions in Tennessee are almost completely going away within the next month. But less than a decade ago, the state had more protections for abortion than the rest of the country.
1973: Roe v. Wade, and support in the Tennessee legislature
When the Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide with its ruling on Roe v. Wade, that overruled a century-long abortion ban in Tennessee. A decade later, Hedy Weinberg became the director of the Tennessee affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union. It was an era in which some influential lawmakers were on their side, she remembers.
“[Former state Rep.] Mike Murphy was chair of the Judiciary Committee there and very conscious of the importance of protecting a woman’s right to abortion,” she says. They successfully lobbied to defeat some additional restrictions on abortion.
But some restrictions remained, like a 72-hour waiting period and a mandatory consultation with a physician. So in the early ’90s, the ACLU worked with Planned Parenthood to sue the state.
2000: The Tennessee Supreme Court strengthens protections
After a yearlong legal battle, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled in Planned Parenthood of Middle Tennessee v. Sundquist that the state constitution — not just the national one — also protected the right to an abortion. “We specifically hold that a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy is a vital part of the right to privacy guaranteed by the Tennessee Constitution,” the majority wrote.
It was a major blow to anti-abortion activists — and a welcome safeguard for proponents of abortion rights.
“We always feared for that Roe would be overturned. Sometimes it was like, ‘That’s not really going to happen,’ but … the pendulum swings both ways,” Weinberg said.
And this began Republican lawmakers’ attempt to swing the pendulum back.
Months after the Tennessee Supreme Court ruling, former state Sen. David Fowler started the long process of undoing this protection by introducing a constitutional amendment. It was a strategy that one Supreme Court justice explicitly laid out in his dissent.
2014: Amendment 1 passes by a slim margin
The path to amend the state constitution is an arduous one in Tennessee. It took 13 years, longer than Fowler was even in the legislature, but in 2014, voters approved the amendment by five percentage points, 52.6% to 47.4%.
The amendment directly negated the Tennessee Supreme Court’s reasoning from 2000 by adding a clarification: “Nothing in this Constitution secures or protects a right to abortion.”
That paved the way for increasingly restrictive rules surrounding abortion, and now the near-total abortion ban that will soon go into effect in Tennessee.
When Fowler heard the news of the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe, he felt it was a long time coming.
“It was a sense of relief that I’d hoped would come about at some point, when I started working on this in 2001,” Fowler says. “That’s why I’ve begun to say, you have to play the long game.”
2022: What’s next
Fowler says he’s now focusing on a strategy to undermine the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision.
Meanwhile, Weinberg is retiring next week, but she says the ACLU will focus on mobilizing voters around abortion and working on issues related to voting rights. This too, she acknowledges, is a long game.
“The fighting will continue, and it’s not going to be in the courtroom … The only way we can overturn this decision in this state is to ensure that people are voting,” she says. “The pendulum has swung radically to the other side, but I can guarantee you — maybe not in my lifetime — it will swing back.”
Correction: A previous version of this story mischaracterized the abortion rights voters the ACLU says it will focus on mobilizing. The group says it will target voters across the political spectrum, not just liberal voters.
On Air - 90.3 WPLN-FM