DR GABRIELLE JAMELA HOSEIN
IN SOLIDARITY with those who can become pregnant, our eyes are on the impending US Supreme Court decision regarding Roe v Wade.
A draft leaked in the press just over a week ago created a sense of terror among women and reproductive justice activists across states in which abortion isn't protected by state law. A change to the federal law will result in higher numbers of unsafe abortions and unwanted children, and fundamentally deny women's right to decide what happens to their bodies.
In 1973, Roe v Wade led to a Supreme Court ruling that abortion access was part of a right to privacy protected by the US Constitution. This protection extended until foetal viability or the point at which a foetus could live outside of a woman's body, usually from about 24 weeks after conception.
As long as a foetus is inseparable from the person within whom and from whom it is growing, it should be governed by that individual's right to choose what happens to and within that body, and to make those decisions privately.
There have been decades of mobilising to limit and reverse this landmark judgment including court cases seeking to limit use of public health resources for safe terminations, legislation enabling private citizens to sue doctors who perform abortions or anyone else who 'aids and abets' one, and proposals to make travelling to another state to access a safe termination illegal.
This is one the reasons that Donald Trump pushed through right-wing Supreme Court appointees Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, who was upfront about being anti-choice.
The awaited US Supreme Court decision is a response to a legal challenge, by the Jackson Women's Health Organisation and the Center for Reproductive Rights, to Mississippi's 2018 Gestational Age Act which banned any abortion after 15 weeks with exceptions for medical emergency and severe foetal abnormality, but no exception in cases of rape or incest. In other words, rape victims would be forced to bear a child forced upon them, a life-long violation that can only and has only ever been experienced by females.
Beyond rape and incest, however, women make the significant decision to terminate a pregnancy for many reasons, whether economic, such as an inability to afford (more) children, or emotional, such as an inability to cope with a child. Some women thought they couldn't get pregnant, but did. Some had contraception fail.
What's undeniable is that abortion bans do not stop abortion, they just prevent terminations from being safely, legally and immediately accessed. They most affect pregnant people who cannot afford private healthcare, and those who are in states that oppose women's rights.
In the US, this means non-white, migrant, rural, young, indigenous and low-income girls and women will face greater risks in conditions where healthcare, child care, housing and food are already barely affordable for many working-class families. T
