Voices of US women left in background
US Constitutional law is a bit of a mystery to most of us – if we’re having to form opinions on how the Constitution affects daily life in America, then the non-expert is likely to be all at sea pretty quickly.
I’m not an expert, but having ploughed through the draft Supreme Court opinion on Roe v Wade, leaked this week, I can see it leans heavily on historical evidence showing abortion was illegal for centuries until the Roe v Wade decision 50 years ago.
Roe v Wade was won largely on the argument that the Constitution enshrines the right to privacy – that women should be left to make private decisions about their bodies without the intervention of the state.
When President Biden was interviewed about this a couple of days ago, he listed the taken-for-granted rights that might be next: who you marry, whether you decide to conceive a child, how you raise a child.
Biden was referencing a 1965 decision, Griswold v Connecticut, which ruled the Constitution ‘‘protects the liberty of married couples to buy and use contraceptives without government restriction’’.
The idea that contraception could be banned sounds ludicrous – but until recent years, so did the idea that abortion could become unavailable to the majority of American women.
I get why the current panic around Roe v Wade has taken this turn. It’s much easier to drum up support for the status quo if you can name the possible – if unintended – nightmare consequences that might follow.
But it leaves the voices of American women on abortion specifically, in the background. It leaves less room to examine the consequences of a Supreme Court decision striking down Roe v Wade. And those consequences would be deadly.
A peer-reviewed paper released last year showed a nationwide ban could lead to a 21% increase in pregnancy-related deaths by year two. Black women would fare worse, with a 33% increase; the figures don’t account for the risks of more women using unsafe abortion methods.
It’s folly to suggest banning abortions would ever stop women from seeking one. Statistics in countries that ban abortion or allow it only to save a woman’s life, closely match those for countries that legally allow it.
The background argument to all of this hasn’t changed; it’s another thing to add to the long list of evidence that women’s health issues are somehow less important.
Many of the memes popping up on social media this week have referenced this. One shared over and over goes like this:
‘‘Stop abortion at the source. Vasectomies are reversible. Make every young man have one. When he’s deemed financially and emotionally fit to be a father it will be reversed. What’s that? Did the idea of regulating a man’s body make you uncomfortable? Then mind your f…... business.’’
There’s always a hollow laugh for such suggestions. On an equal playing field, though, a vasectomy would be less invasive, cost less, and have fewer health consequences than forcing women to go through with pregnancies they don’t want or can’t manage.
Less startling, and more powerful, are the words of Dave Barnhart, a Methodist pastor in Alabama. Barnhart first wrote them on Facebook in 2018, and this week they went properly viral.
‘‘The unborn are a convenient group of people to advocate for,’’ the pastor wrote.
‘‘They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn.
‘‘It’s almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without reimagining social structures, apologising, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.
‘‘Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.’’
Now, American women holding their breath lest their rights to life and health be whisked away at the stroke of the justices’ pen.