Legal Abortion Has Never Been So Close to Being Totally Banned
There’s a Wrecking Ball Aimed at Women’s Health and At Their Citizenship Status Equal to That of Men
There was a time when women who found themselves with pregnancies they did not want to keep were not treated as wanton criminals. Way back in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade, abortion was legalized in New York and a year later was available in six states.
It was also legal in the nation’s capital where, in 1973, as a newspaper reporter in Washington I covered a story about one of the eight abortion clinics in town. At Welcoming Abortion Boutique, Women Come Out Smiling, read the headline.
The clinic was a beautiful, calm and caring place where women could easily make an appointment for a same-day procedure. Abortions were available up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. No one was out on the sidewalks screaming at them. No one was about to kill one of the clinics 13 doctors, who were all ob-gyns. Patients were “extensively counseled” and no one was turned away for lack of funds. “We have a sliding scale of $150 to zero,” the clinic’s president told me.
The method was a two-minute vacuum aspirator process described as “practically painless,” followed with up to an hour rest with a nurse taking vitals.
A check-up visit was required a week later. Women were counseled on birth control methods and some husbands, who accompanied their wives to the clinic, came back for a vasectomy.
All this, before abortion became a political wrecking ball aimed at denigrating and punishing women. Evangelicals, various other anti-abortionists, and a majority of white male Republican lawmakers are among those enraged by the audacity of women they don’t know, who want to manage their own lives, their reproductive health care and their own decisions when and if they have children.
The anti-abortionists have been rewarded for their crusade against women by a dominance of white male Republican state governors and legislators, particularly in the South, bent on closing all the reproductive health clinics. Of six states already down to one clinic, Missouri’s single clinic is always about to be closed. Last May a circuit judge ordered a temporary restraining order to keep the Planned Parenthood clinic open. If the injunction holds, the clinic will still have to worry about a current Missouri law mandating an eight-week abortion ban.
While Roe v. Wade legalized a woman’s right to an abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy, several Republican state governments are rolling roughshod over this provision, passing laws limiting abortion to as short a time as six weeks.
Included in the six week ban are Louisiana, Georgia. Kentucky, Mississippi and Ohio. Most of those states would also ban abortions for women who’ve been raped or become pregnant through incest. The latter ban could apply to barely puberty age girls.
Alabama is out to ban abortions entirely. Doctors performing them could be jailed for life. There are already doctors in many states who face prison if they assist a pregnant woman whose life is in dire danger from one of the many problems that can occur during a pregnancy. There are no comparable restrictions between men and their doctors.
It might be useful when considering these laws that can impact women, to know that the United States has a higher total of maternal deaths than any other developed nation.
Most of these new anti-Roe abortion laws are being challenged in the courts and won’t take affect unless they are upheld. If the laws do hold up, it will soon become almost impossible to get an abortion in most of the South.
When these lawmakers took on the Right to Life banner, they didn’t mean women’s lives. “I believe the right to life supersedes every other right we have,” a Louisiana Republican representative was quoted in an AP article. “How much do we value life?” To which, a Democratic representative replied, “Who are you to tell a woman what they can and cannot do with their body?”
Who are these men who have such a low regard for women? Their laws are a threat to women’s right to make decisions based on their own health needs and their own doctors’ expertise.
In addition to denying women’s Constitutional right to abortion, these state laws are aimed at the Supreme Court. Which gets us to our misogynist in chief, Donald Trump, once pro-abortion, who has joined the anti-women brigade.
Trump has kept his promise to the evangelicals that he’d only nominate anti-abortion Supreme Court Justices. As soon as there were vacancies, the majority Republican Senate promptly confirmed two more. With the Court now tilted rightward with five conservative Justices, the chances for continued legal abortion in the United States are in serious jeopardy. To the imminent danger to millions of women in the United States.
Meanwhile, Trump is constantly fomenting his base with his baseless, seriously rabble rousing rhetoric. Nothing and nobody stops his lies. When he carries on about doctors “…allowing children to be ripped from their mother’s wombs…”, and then along with the mother, “…determine whether … to execute the baby,” then somebody in the White House should yell, STOP!
