For those of you that do not know, Roe vs Wade is a 1973 lawsuit that led the supreme court in making a ruling about abortion rights. According to Britannica, the case began in 1970 when an unmarried, pregnant woman named Norma McCorvey, who went by the undercover name of Jane Roe to protect her identity, instituted a federal action against Henry Wade, the district attorney of Dallas county in Texas. Roe filed a lawsuit on behalf of herself and others willing to challenge Texas abortion laws, which at the time had banned them unless it was deemed necessary in order to save the life of the mother. Otherwise, it was considered a crime to get or attempt an abortion.
The case forced the Supreme Court to consider two major factors: First, the United States Constitution provides a fundamental right to privacy, which Roe argued protects an individual’s right to choose whether or not to have an abortion. Second was the fact that the abortion right must be balanced on some level in order to acknowledge the government’s interests in protecting health and prenatal life (FindLaw). The latter justification arose from the conservative belief that life begins with conception, or during the prenatal phase, whereas others with more liberal ideals believe that life begins at birth. This led to massive debates on whether or not abortion rights could be considered Constitutional in the US.
In the original case, the court attempted to appease both sides of the argument through a compromise. While it was formally recognized that abortion is a privacy right, and that the inability to terminate a pregnancy can result in various complications for the woman forced to continue with it, the court also divided the nine-month pregnancy process into three 12-week trimesters that dictate a person’s right to end their pregnancy. According to SupremeFindLaw.com, the Court determined that for the duration of a person’s first trimester, a state cannot regulate a person’s right to an abortion beyond requiring that the procedure “be performed by a licensed doctor in medically safe conditions.” During the second trimester, a state may regulate abortion unless it is related to the health of the pregnant person. However, during the third trimester of the pregnancy, the state’s interest in protecting the potential human life outweighs the right to privacy. Therefore, the state may prohibit abortions unless it becomes completely necessary for the purpose of preserving the life/health of said pregnant person.
Unfortunately, for years after this decision was made people continued to struggle with the ruling and states began to make their own rules regarding abortion regulations. So, in May 2021 the Supreme Court agreed to review a lower court’s decision to strike down a Mississippi state law, adopted in 2018, that banned most abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy, well before the point of fetal viability. Although the law was clearly unconstitutional under the decisions derived from the original Roe v. Wade case, Mississippi lawmakers passed it in hopes that a legal challenge would make its way to the Supreme Court, and that a conservative majority of justices would file complaints and eventually overturn those decisions. This dispute on whether bans on all pre-viability abortions are unconstitutional is known as the Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization trial.
The official results were released on June 24, 2022, confirming the Court held that there is no constitutional right to abortion. As a result, each state could henceforth independently decide its legality within their respective areas. Soon after, several states adopted laws that drastically limited the availability of abortion. As of November 6 this year, it was reported that a total of 13 states have complete bans on abortion during any trimester. According to Guttmacher Institute, these states include Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia.
So, what does women’s health care look like now in 2024, two years after the overturning? Well it’s not pretty. A right previously protected women from the harsh effects of unwanted childbirth (whether the pregnancy be unplanned or due to terrible circumstances such as rape/incest), a right that helped teenagers continue to have childhoods rather than cut it short and scramble to learn to be mothers at too young of an age, a right that gave women the liberty to make their own choices about their bodies, was suddenly renounced without the proper consideration of the repercussions that would inevitably result. MSI Reproductive Choices stated, “Anti-rights groups are even expanding their attempts to restrict the sexual and reproductive rights of those living in the US.” Attempts to obstruct the use of mifepristone (an abortion medication), and the removal of possibly life-saving care for women in emergency situations are just a couple of ways the anti-rights movement is trying to erode away at abortion rights in the US.
This law is an attack on fundamental and necessary human rights. Not only does it threaten the lives of so many women, but forcing someone to continue an unwanted pregnancy or seek out an unsafe and unauthorized abortion is extremely dangerous and “a violation of their human rights, including the rights to privacy and bodily and reproductive autonomy” (Amnesty International). On average, there are about 33 maternal mortality cases out of every 100,000 live births, a number that doubled since 2018, and is expected to increase due to the restrictions imposed in recent years. Additionally, because abortion has become so stigmatised in numerous states, an estimated 25 million unsafe abortions take place every year, which are commonly not done by licensed medical professionals and can result in various life-threatening effects including severe hemorrhage, sepsis (severe general infection), poisoning, uterine perforation, or damage to other internal organs, which can be fatal.
Currently, women and girls around the world are suffering greatly from this global anti-rights movement. To give a better idea of the effects of abortion bans, here are some real life stories from people who have experienced them.
In an article published by ProPublica, Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana detailed the atrocities a pregnant teenage girl by the name of Navaeh Crain experienced in Vidor, Texas on the morning of October 29, 2023. After acquiring a fever, extreme pain, and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two separate emergency rooms within 12 hours, both times without receiving proper medical care and attention for the severity of the situation. The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without even investigating her abdominal pain, but after the second, she tested positive for Sepsis, which is a life-threatening condition in which the body responds improperly to an infection (Mayo Clinic). Even after her diagnosis, the teen was still released. Then, during Crain’s third hospital visit after her pain had become unbearable, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to determine if her fetus still had a heartbeat before moving her to intensive care. Unfortunately, by that time Crain’s nurses had noted that her blood pressure had completely plummeted. Her organs began failing, and within a couple of hours, the teen died from her infection and hemorrhaging.
This is just one example of the major issues women are facing in terms of proper health care with the abortion bans and restrictions. According to Sara Rosenbaum, a health law/policy professor emerita at George Washington University, “Pregnant women have become essentially untouchables.” This is because Texas law threatens medical professionals with jail time for ending a fetal heartbeat. Although it includes exceptions for life-threatening conditions, doctors are running around in reluctant circles, fearful of the repercussions that might occur just from doing their jobs. Naveah’s mother, Candace Fails, claims her daughter’s death could have been prevented had the doctors treated the emergency with proper medical attention rather than forcing her to seek help from several different hospitals.
Another example of the outrageous consequences of the abortion bans is the story of a woman named Amber Nicole Thurman, the mother of a six-year-old son, who suffered from an infection that the Atlanta Hospital where she died was fully capable of treating. She’d been taking abortion pills after finding out she was pregnant with twins in order to preserve her nowfound stability as a single mother, but needed to remove the fetal tissue from her body. However, when the 28-year-old Georgian mom went to the hospital to undergo the procedure, she ran into complications. Georgian law had just recently made performing the operation a felony, and any doctor who violated this law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison, similar to the laws in Texas. It took over 20 hours for doctors to finally operate, but by then her blood pressure had dropped and her organs had already begun failing.
Kavitha Surana stated in a ProPublica article that the death was just one of many preventable abortion-related deaths that have occurred over the past two years. Tragedies such as these are devastating, but the fact that it could have been avoided makes the whole situation even more unacceptable. These women’s situations should have been cared for with the same urgency as other extremities, if not with more. No woman should be forced to suffer the same fate, and we as a society have the power to stop more instances like this from happening. We must rise up now to end this unjust attack on the rights of women. It’s not the 17th century anymore, and humanity cannot afford to be moving backwards in history.
