Fears abortion laws will force women’s hands

New laws restricting abortion access in the United States raise the spectre of women ending unwanted pregnancies with coat hangers and knitting needles in unsafe, back-alley procedures, reproductive rights experts said on Wednesday.

Women now may get medical abortions using pills, which is considered very safe, and find information online on handling unwanted pregnancies, delegates said this week at Women Deliver, the world’s largest conference on gender equality.

Yet many will not have access to those options, said Merle Hoffman, who opened one of the first US abortion clinics in New York, where the procedure was legal before Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court 1973 ruling that gave women the right nationwide.

“You don’t know that it won’t be coat hangers,” Hoffman said. “There are very many young women and poor women and women of colour, minority women around this country who don’t have that access and may in fact resort to those kinds of things.” Nine states have passed strict laws restricting abortion access this year, seen as part of a multistate effort to have the high court reconsider its historic decision – a hot topic at the conference, attended by about 8,000 people.

The bans have been championed by conservatives, many of them Christian, who say foetuses should have rights comparable to those of infants and view abortion as tantamount to murder.

“Do I think there’s going to be more unsafe abortion? Yes,” said Robyn Churchill, a nurse-midwife who lives in Boston.

“Do I think it might be not go all the way back to pre-’73, the coat hanger, back-alley abortions? I’m very hopeful that it won’t,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on the sidelines of the We Deliver conference.

Is it going to be more unsafe abortion? Yes.

Is it back to pre-73, hopefully not