Women’s Right To Live
OVERTURNING Roe v. Wade would be a catastrophe for women’s health — and in some cases, would cost women their life.
But it won’t lead to fewer abortions.
A study published in the Lancet in 2016 found that, in countries with legal restrictions on the procedure, the rate of abortion is slightly higher than in countries where abortion is legal.
Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that effectively legalized abortion throughout the country, occurred in 1973. That’s not when women in the US started having abortions. It’s when they started having safe ones.
A 2003 report cited by the Guttmacher Institute estimates that in the US in 1967 there were 829,000 illegal or self-induced abortions. That’s seven years after birthcontrol pills became widely available. In 2014, despite the US population nearly doubling, there were 652,639 abortions, fewer than when it was illegal.
The difference, then, isn’t between abortion and no abortion. It’s between a safe procedure and a dangerous one.
In the United States, the death rate from safe, legal abortion is less than 1 percent, making it, according to the World Health Organization, “as safe as an injection of penicillin.”
It wasn’t always. In 1960, 27 women in California died following abortions. In 1976, post-Roe, none did. Jesse H. Choper’s Judicial Review notes that “an untold number of women have also avoided being permanently maimed, becoming sterile, or suffering other serious illness as a result of the court’s mandate.”
We know what desperate methods women use to perform abortions in places like El Salvador, where abortion has been illegal since 1998. Amnesty International explains women resort to “ingesting rat poison or other pesticides, and thrusting knitting needles, pieces of wood and other sharp objects into the cervix.” Interviews with Irish women who have tried to induce their own abortions cited in the Irish Times say that methods include, “coat hangers . . . drinking bleach, throwing themselves down stairs.”
In 2016, a Tennessee woman attempted to induce an abortion with a coat hanger. A study by the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Policy Evaluation Project indicated that, in Texas, where abortion is strictly regulated, between 100,000 and 240,000 women have tried to induce their own abortions.
Some DIY abortions will present complications. Some women will die from them.
One out of four women in the US has had an abortion by age 45. If this doesn’t concern you, it con- cerns someone you know and love. Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota and South Dakota have laws intended to ban abortion if Roe is overturned.
President Trump has remarked such women will just need to go out of state. But for many, that’s simply not an option.
Like the 24-year-old in Texas who attempted to perform her own abortion. She told The Atlantic in 2015, “I didn’t even have any money to get across town.” Ac- cording to the Guttmacher Institute, 75 percent of abortion patients in 2014 were poor or lowincome.
The “Roe” of Roe v. Wade herself was in similar straits when she found herself pregnant. Her case eventually went to the Supreme Court, which found that a ban on abortion violated her 14th Amendment right to privacy.
The decision was built on the precedent of prior cases like Griswold v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird, which found that the right to privacy extends to a couple’s decision to use birth control.
In Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, the court affirmed its decision, explaining the right to privacy “protects citizens against governmental intrusion in such intimate family matters as procreation, childrearing, marriage and contraceptive choice . . . In Roe v. Wade, this Court correctly applied these principles to a woman’s right to choose abortion.”
For those who consider themselves pro-life: You can help lower the number of abortions without restricting pregnant women’s rights. You can offer support to family or friends struggling with whether or not to have a child (tell them you’ll be around to babysit whenever they need you). You can fight for lower cost maternal and child care. You can campaign for free birth-control options, which have been proven to reduce the rate of abortion.
You have choices. Leave women with theirs.