It’s Only the Law

It’s against the law for legal-services attorneys to use federal funds to litigate in favor of, or to help procure, non-therapeutic abortions, but that doesn’t stop them—they have a mission.

That mission was probably best expressed by Dorothy Lang, a lawyer from the National Health Law Program, in a February 1981 article in Clearinghouse Review, the monthly (taxpayer-financed) bible of the legal-services movement. “Poor women,” she wrote, “need to exercise control over their own bodies by making their own decisions as to when to abort and when to be sterilized. To exercise this control they need assistance in maintaining a guaranteed source of funding for abortions and sterilizations…. It is critical to the lives and health of our female clients that we undertake these tasks immediately.”

RK

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R. Cort Kirkwood

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It’s against the law for legal-services attorneys to use federal funds to litigate in favor of, or to help procure, non-therapeutic abortions, but that doesn’t stop them—they have a mission.

That mission was probably best expressed by Dorothy Lang, a lawyer from the National Health Law Program, in a February 1981 article in Clearinghouse Review, the monthly (taxpayer-financed) bible of the legal-services movement. “Poor women,” she wrote, “need to exercise control over their own bodies by making their own decisions as to when to abort and when to be sterilized. To exercise this control they need assistance in maintaining a guaranteed source of funding for abortions and sterilizations…. It is critical to the lives and health of our female clients that we undertake these tasks immediately.”