Abortion opponents saw their issue take center stage when Sen. Lindsey Graham questioned Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor about her 12-year tenure with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.
In particular, the South Carolina Republican asked Tuesday about legal briefs the group filed arguing for an expansion of abortion rights. In one of those cases, Graham said, the group claimed that denying a woman access to an abortion was a form of slavery. Sotomayor said she never read those briefs, an assertion that abortion opponents say is hard to believe.
A look at the facts of the case:
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GRAHAM SAID: "Well, in their briefs, they argued, and I will submit the quotes to you, that if you deny a low-income woman Medicaid funding, taxpayer funds, to have an abortion, if you deny her that, that's a form of slavery. And I can get the quotes. Do you agree with that?"
THE FACTS: The 1980 Supreme Court case, Williams v. David Zbaraz, challenged an Illinois law that said state money could not be used to pay for abortions for poor people, except when necessary to save the life of the mother.
The brief Graham referred to was filed by the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, along with 285 other civil rights groups, seeking a reconsideration after the Supreme Court upheld the Illinois law. At the time, Sotomayor was on the group's board. The brief did not directly equate the abortion funding policy with slavery as Graham characterized it, but did allude to such a comparison.
"Just as Dred Scott v. Sanford refused citizenship to black people, these opinions strip the poor of meaningful citizenship under fundamental law," the documents say.
The Dred Scott case ruled that slaves are not citizens.
In the abortion case, the civil rights groups argued that, under the Constitution, treating people differently because they are black is the same as treating them differently because they are poor. By citing the Dred Scott case, the lawyers clearly sought to draw a parallel between denying abortion access and slavery. But they did not argue that denying poor women access to free abortions was a form of slavery, as Graham asserted.
