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Woman says ACLU attorney pushed her to have abortion in landmark 1973 case

In a case being closely watched by conservatives, the Supreme Court plans to hear a suit to reverse the Doe vs. Bolton abortion decision in 1973.

Sandra Cano, the anonymous Doe and one of the women who sued for a legalized abortion, has argued that she never wanted an abortion. Instead, Ms. Cano said she was pushed into it by an aggressive American Civil Liberties Union attorney when she was a 22-year-old victim of an abusive husband with her three children in foster care.

"What I received was something I never requested—the legal right to abort my child," Ms. Cano said in an affidavit in 2000.

In a case meant to be considered on Oct. 6, Ms. Cano said the justices, despite advances in medicine, have "frozen abortion law based on obsolete 1973 assumptions and prevented the normal regulation of the practice of medicine." The case has been followed by abortion foes in both the evangelical and Catholic communities.

"Sandra Cano is pro-life and has stated her opposition to abortion from the beginning," said Priests for Life, a church-based anti-abortion group.

In January 2006, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that neither it nor any U.S. District Court had the authority to reverse the Supreme Court's decisions in Doe v. Bolton or Roe v. Wade. In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled on both cases on the same day.

"Nothing in the language or history of the Constitution," wrote Justice

Byron R. White in the dissenting opinion in the 1973 ruling, "supported the court's judgment, and the court had simply fashioned and announced a new constitutional right for pregnant mothers and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, had invested the right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes, whereas the issue of abortion should actually have been left with the people and the political process they have devised to govern their own affairs."

In her affidavit to the U.S. District Court in New Jersey, Ms. Cano said she approached a legal aid office in Atlanta for help in regaining custody of her children and a divorce from her husband. She said she was taken advantage of by an "aggressive self-serving attorney, Margie Pitts Hames, the legal-aid attorney."

Ms. Cano said she never signed an affidavit that said she did not want or could not care for another baby. The affidavit also raised the possibility that she might commit suicide.

"I am 99 percent certain that I did not sign this affidavit,"

Ms. Cano said. "I do not believe it is my signature on the affidavit, and Margie either forged my signature or slipped this document in with other papers while I was signing divorce papers. I never told Margie that I wanted an abortion. The facts stated in the affidavit in Doe v. Bolton are not true."

Ms. Cano said her mother and the legal aid attorney tried to force her to have an abortion. She said she fled to Oklahoma and returned when she was assured that she would not have to undergo an abortion. Ms. Cano said she went to court where she was told by her attorney not to speak.

Years after the Supreme Court decision, Ms. Cano sued to open up her records, a move opposed by Ms. Pitts Hames. The records showed that Ms. Cano had applied for abortion, was rejected and then sued the state of Georgia, all of which she said was a lie.

"The basic thing is that Doe v. Bolton was fraud," Ms. Cano said. "None of this was my decision. None of this was me. I don't understand why no one took it upon themselves in such an important case, a case that allowed a law to be passed to take innocent human lives, to speak to the plaintiff in the case. Why they didn't speak to me?"