Lori Falce: Despite what happened in Arizona, medicine and law can't roll backward

Medicine advances at a remarkable rate, with each new advance building on the discoveries that came before it.

Today’s immunology and microsurgery and miracle drugs wouldn’t be possible without the anatomical, imaging and pharmaceutical innovations of the last century. There are entire branches of medicine that didn’t exist just a few decades ago.

The same goes for law.

American legislation and court interpretations are not a house of cards. They are like Lego bricks — each independent but interlocking and creating a sum larger and stronger than the individual. But that is because they advance knowledge and understanding over time.

The last thing we need in medicine or in law is to move backward.

On Tuesday, the Arizona Supreme Court decided the state could go back to enforcement of an 1864 law criminalizing all abortions other than those where the mother’s life is threatened. It is the latest move in the wake of the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

In 1864, medicine was very different than it is today. Joseph Lister had not yet pioneered his use of antiseptics in surgery. Louis Pasteur was four years away from explaining that infection was caused by germs. There were no X-ray images, let alone ultrasounds.

We did not understand diabetes, heart disease or antibiotics — all of which can impact a successful, healthy pregnancy. Death in childbirth was common — about 25 per 1,000 births, according to the National Institutes of Health. Today it is about 32.9 per 100,000 live births.

In 1864, the law was different, too. Arizona wasn’t a state. It was only narrowly a territory of the Union; in 1862, the Confederacy claimed it. The U.S. Constitution only had 12 amendments. Slavery was still legal. Black people had no rights. Women couldn’t vote and needed permission from a man to do things like open a bank account.

The law didn’t recognize interracial marriage. The federal Emmett Till Antilynching Act wasn’t passed until 2022, but the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill presented in 1921 and filibustered dead by the Senate was still 57 years away.

The Arizona Supreme Court decision tries to reset the clock on one issue: abortion. But clocks don’t work that way.

You cannot roll back time regarding a single issue without impacting others. By the same token, you can’t ignore 150 years of progress, invention, discovery and growth to cherry-pick one thing to change.

To put Arizona back to 1864 regarding abortion impacts a host of other obstetric and gynecological issues. There are things we understand today about pregnancy that we didn’t then, like ectopic pregnancy. There are skills we have learned to help grow families. Reproductive endocrinologists didn’t exist in 1864.

And you cannot pull that single Lego brick out of the wall of Arizona law without pulling down more along the way. The U.S. Supreme Court’s responses on dismantling Roe v. Wade show that. Justice Clarence Thomas’ immediate response was to look at other decisions predicated on the same precedent, including gay marriage.

Medicine and the law both build upon the past. Asking them to roll backward is dangerous.