“With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent”
On 24th June 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned the landmark judgment of Roe v. Wade, which established the constitutional right to abortion in the US since 1973, thereby ending the 50 years of Federal Abortion Rights. The court in a 6:3 ruling powered by its conservation majority upheld a Republican backed Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks. The majority stated that “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.”
Recently in the month of May, scores of pro-choice and anti-abortion campaigners flocked to the US Supreme Court through the night after learning that the court was ready to reverse a landmark half-century-old precedent of Roe v. Wade. This information came from a leaked draft of a majority opinion published by Politico on 2nd May 2022, which the Supreme Court affirmed was “authentic,” with Chief Justice John Roberts labelling the leak a “egregious breach” of the court’s trust and the gravest, most unforgivable sin. Politico stated that “The unprecedented revelation is bound to intensify the debate over what was already the most controversial case on the docket this term.”
Abortions have been around for quite a long time, but they have drawn attention for a variety of reasons throughout history, some in support and others in opposition. Abortion is a crucial health concern for women, yet it is progressively regulated by patriarchal forces that seek to limit women’s rights to undergo abortion on their own terms. When access to legal abortion is curtailed, people revert to unethical and illegal procedures.
The decision of the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade 1973 and a subsequent 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey prohibit the States from enacting laws restricting abortions before the point of foetal viability, which is roughly 24 weeks of pregnancy i.e., women were given an absolute right to an abortion in the first three months of pregnancy and limited rights in the second trimester. The ruling upheld the notion of personal liberty as embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects citizens from government meddling in their deeply personal decisions. The issue, however, has prompted a social and ideological battle between Democrats that criticized the probable rollback of guaranteed federal protection for abortion rights and Republicans that were furious over the disclosure of the extremely sensitive document, thereby polarising the country’s already polarised society and politics. It fuelled a raging discussion in the US about whether or to what extent abortion should be legal, who should decide on its legality, and what influence moral and religious beliefs should have in politics.
The draft was inscribed by Justice Samuel Alito with the concurrence of at least four other conservative members of Supreme Court. The draft calls the landmark judgment that enshrines right to abortion as “egregiously wrong from the start” as its reasoning was exceptionally weak and the decision has had damaging consequences. Since there is no federal law in the US protecting the right to abortion, overturning Roe would end guarantee of federal constitutional safeguard of abortion rights and permit individual states to entirely restrict when and how women could terminate their pregnancies without federal courts having a voice over the legality of those restrictions if Alito’s draft opinion is officially announced by the court before its term expires in nearly two months. The draft would be a massive victory for religious conservatives, who have been attempting for ages to have the Supreme Court overturn the judgments that made abortion a constitutional right. It is anticipated that 24 States legislatures such as Alabama, Indiana, Oklahoma etc. would “almost assuredly” move to prohibit or significantly restrict abortion access, with low-income and at-risk women bearing the brunt of the consequences in the majority of cases. Women of colour are more likely to request abortions in states that prohibit them, more likely to die after childbirth, and also more likely to be arrested if something goes off beam with their pregnancy. Countless women will have to travel further to obtain an abortion, often crossing state frontiers, and will have to spend more for it.
It is pertinent to mention that the Texas Heartbeat law, which went into effect on 1st September 2021, is the most stringent abortion law in the country. It is a Texas law that prohibits abortion after the identification of embryonic or foetal heart activity, which normally occurs about six weeks of pregnancy, with medical circumstances being the only exception. It empowers private citizens to sue Texas abortion “providers” who break the law, as well as anyone who “aids or abets” a woman undergoing the operation. Abortion patients themselves, on the other hand, cannot be sued. There are no exceptions to the statute for rape or incest. If the action is successful, the person bringing the lawsuit is entitled to at least $10,000 in damages. Heartbeat is a universal sign of life thus if a Texan’s heartbeat is detected his/her life will be protected.
The inherent right of a woman or girl to make autonomous decisions about her own body and reproductive processes lies at the heart of her fundamental right to equality, liberty, and privacy in matters of physical and psychological integrity. Legalizing abortion protects women’s bodily integrity and autonomy, as well as their human rights to the most intimate and profound aspects of their identity: sexual freedom, family planning, and many more. Abortion alludes to a woman’s reproductive rights and freedom to choose whether or not to terminate her pregnancy, which should not be constrained by governmental or religious authority.
Poor women and women of colour, many of whom do not have trustworthy and quality health care, are especially vulnerable if something goes wrong with their pregnancy. When Black women have pregnancy difficulties, they are not listened to or believed because they are perceived to have higher pain thresholds. Black maternal death rates are greater across class, education, and socio-economic level and the primary cause is racism. Many women and children’s health are jeopardised because they become pregnant unwittingly, causing them to bear an undesired child or seek an illegal abortion. Legalised abortion eliminates maternal deaths, and unplanned pregnancies, and enables women to live without fear of being condemned or victimised.
Without Roe, the US would join a minuscule group of countries like Poland, El Salvador that have tightened abortion laws since 1994. In that period as per the Centre for Reproductive Rights around 59 countries expanded access to abortion. Iraq, Egypt, the Dominican Republic, and other countries currently restrict abortion. If a foetal abnormality is diagnosed after 20 weeks, Nepal and many European countries, including the UK, France, and Italy, allow abortion. Countries such as Vietnam, Germany, and Canada, on the other hand, allow abortion at any time if a request is made for social or medical reasons.
The choice to keep a pregnancy or terminate it is basically and largely a woman’s decision since it potentially determines her entire future and has a significant impact on women’s enjoyment of other human rights. When abortion is available at the behest of women and is universally accessible and affordable, it will be safe, simplistic, and indisputable. Availability to secure and legal abortion is a fundamental component of reproductive and sexual equality, and must be perceived as such in contemporary discourse on democracy which seeks to build righteous society devoid of all sorts of discrimination. State actions should be confined to comprehensive and secure abortion procedures along with other sexual and reproductive healthcare as beyond that any interference in matters of choice violates the right to privacy and equality. Unsafe abortion results in the deaths of women and the eerie silence around it obscure key concerns that lay at the confluence of these issues such as the difficult barriers that minor girls face in attaining reproductive health care, including abortion. The right to secure abortion is a vital cornerstone of a woman’s right to bodily integrity, autonomy, equality, privacy, liberty, and life, and therefore must be guarded. To achieve reproductive justice, women must be trusted to make their own decisions about their bodies. ‘Men shouldn’t be making laws about women bodies’.
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