The battle on abortion rights in 2020
By: Antoine Blodgett
Tags: Abortion, Health, Feminism, Healthcare, Women

The battle on abortion rights in 2020

Abortion rights is always a matter of debate between left and right wing views

I cannot think of a more startling example of mass refusal to see the obvious than is presented by current attitudes toward the population problem of being overlypopulated on the one hand and abortion on the other.

For several years, we have heard warnings and waning signs on the matter of population crisis. Indeed, so concerned are we that there now are voices in the land calling for “compulsory sterilization” and “compulsory birth control,” for the withholding of public support for illegitimate children in excess of a certain number, for conditioning welfare monies or parole or whatever on coerced sterilization, and so on. Yet little is done to make sterilization easily available on a voluntary basis, particularly to the poor and underprivileged.

Despite the lack of legal strictures against it, it is often withheld by doctors and hospitals from those who need it and want it most. At the same time, there begins to appear on the part of some an alarming readiness to subordinate rights of freedom of choice in the area of human reproduction to governmental coercion.

Notwithstanding all this, we continue to maintain strict anti abortion laws on the books of at least four fifths of our states, denying freedom of choice to women and physicians and compelling the “unwilling to bear the unwanted.”

Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash

Doctor Christopher Tietze and Sarah Lewit point out in the Scientific American for January, 1969: “Abortion is still the most widespread…method of fertility control in the modern world.” According to experts who participated in a United Nations Conference on World Population in Belgrade in 1965, abortion is indeed the chief method of birth control in the world today, and they estimated that about 30 million pregnancies are purposely terminated by abortion each year. Of these, studies indicate that almost one million are in the United States.

Since, however, abortions are still so difficult to obtain, we force the birth of millions more unwanted children every year. If we really want to cut our population growth rate on a voluntary basis, we should make abortion available on a voluntary basis, at least in the early stages of pregnancy.

Population dilemma

I do not recommend abortion as a birth-control method of choice. I merely state that it is in fact the most important single method of birth control in the world today, and to cut down on population growth we should make abortion easy and safe while we continue to develop other and more satisfactory methods of family limitation.

As the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women notes in a pamphlet:

There is no perfect contraceptive. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration reports that the intrauterine devices, one of the most effective contraceptives available today, have a failure rate of 1.5 to 3%. This means that if all married women in the United States could and did use these contraceptives, there would still be about 350,000 to 700,000 unwanted pregnancies a year among married women alone. Even sterilization is not a 100% effective method of contraception; some operations fail. Therefore, in order to insure a complete and thorough birth control program, abortion must be made available as a legal right to all women who request it.

Limitation on abortion rights

On May 15, 2019, the Alabama State Senate passed a bill that restricts the right to abortion by criminalising doctors who do the procedure. This was followed the next day by the Missouri State Senate passing a law forbidding abortions after 8 weeks of pregnancy. These two bills are the latest in a rapidly escalating attack on a woman’s constitutionally protected right to an abortion. Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Ohio have all already successfully passed legislation banning abortion after 6 weeks of pregnancy this year.

The laws thus far on abortion rights are extremely controversial in the context on victims of sexual assault and rape. In this context in 2017, on the start of the race to deny women their reproductive rights as Texas, Kentucky, and Utah introduced bills fundamentally undermining abortion access. The 2 years since have seen these laws increasing in number and scale to the point where the right to access abortion is now an empty construct in some states in the USA.

This would lead to the destruction of reproductive rights in Roe v Wade, and the freedoms it granted, being dismantled across the entire nation. 23·7% of US women will have an abortion by the age of 45 years and 926 000 abortions were done in the USA in 2014. Restrictions will hit poor women and women of colour the hardest. UN human rights spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani went as far as to call them “inherently discriminatory” in an interview with Reuters Television on May 21.

The need for women to access these services, to which they are currently constitutionally entitled, is not something that can be addressed with a ban, much less a ban of the sort that fails to allow for abortion in even the most extreme cases, such as rape. That these bans, the majority of which claim to act in the interest of women’s health but show little or no relation to public health or scientific endeavour worldwide.

The near total restriction of abortion law in Alabama has served to highlight the ongoing lack of protections afforded to women in Northern Ireland. Showing how retrograde both pieces of law-making are, abortions in Northern Ireland are still governed by an 1861 act threatening people accessing or providing an abortion with life imprisonment. There should be no feelings of moral superiority in the UK on viewing the problems women in Alabama have accessing abortion while a country in the UK places the same restrictions on women.

From a religious point of view like Karen Swallow Prior, a professor at the evangelical Liberty University who is a proponent of banning abortion outright, these six-week bans are “a good faith effort” to restrict abortion.

“These bills and the pro-life [anti-abortion] movement are not about punishing women for having sex, they are about preserving a human life that already exists,” Prof Prior says. She emphasised it was not a religiously motivated viewpoint, but one based on science and human rights.

However we’re arguing about autonomy — which is more important, the woman’s or the child’s? As a pro-life feminist, I believe we have to take into account both.

So, among all this regressive, religious, and repressive law-making, where are the advocates for women? The American Medical Association (AMA), in association with several other medical organisations, has issued the following statement: “The [AMA] supports access to abortion and strongly condemns government interference that compromises the ability of doctors to help patients choose options for medically appropriate treatment.”

It is right for these organisations to stand up for the rights of doctors, who are criminalised for doing their jobs, but we must all stand up for women. Abortion is a settled, inviolable right that is central to achieving not only reproductive health goals but women’s freedom over their own bodies. It is of the utmost importance that medical organisations, journals, NGOs, and advocates come together to condemn the rolling back of abortion laws and campaign for rights to be respected.

The new laws will fall most heavily on poor women, disproportionately on women of color, who have the highest abortion rates and will be hard-pressed to travel to distant clinics.

But without legal and accessible abortion rights, the assumptions that have shaped all women’s lives in the past few decades — including that they, not a torn condom or a missed pill or a rapist, will decide what happens to their bodies and their futures — will change.

Women and their daughters will have a harder time, and there will be plenty of people who will say that they were foolish to think that it could be otherwise.Therefore the time has come to consider to abolish abortion laws in its entirety and recognise that each individual has the inviolable and inalienable right to life.