Across the nation today, men and women were protesting stringent anti-abortion bills that have passed in at least eight states recently. There was an impressive rally with close to 200 people at the Capitol today in Phoenix and even more in Tucson.
Alabama’s bill is the most recent and the most stringent. It is essentially an all out ban on abortion because it does not exclude women who have been raped or who have been the victims of incest. It also criminalizes doctors. They can be charged with a felony for conducting an abortion.
Six states including Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, and Ohio have passed heartbeat bills. This means that an abortion cannot be conducted after a heartbeat has been detected. This can be as early as 6 to 8 weeks. Often women don’t even know they’re pregnant by then. Utah and Arkansas ban abortions after the middle of the second trimester.
Some states, like Arizona, still have abortion bans that pre-date Roe v Wade on the books. If one of these 2019 right-wing bills gets to the Supreme Court and results in over-turning Roe, it is unclear what will happen, but Arizona’s law could go into effect.
I was in college at Ohio State, when Roe v Wade passed the Supreme Court. I remember what life was like for young women in the time before abortion was legal and when access to contraception was limited. Everybody was on the “Rhythm Method”, and everybody in the dorm knew if somebody was “late.” I knew at least a half a dozen women in the dorm who were driven to New York for abortions. I knew a guy who got three women pregnant and drove them all to New York City. (You’d think he could figure out that he was part of the problem!) When abortions became legalized in Detroit, my boyfriend and I gave his younger sister a ride to Detroit.
To get birth control pills, I had to take a 1.5 hour bus ride from campus to the Planned Parenthood Clinic in ghetto on the near East Side. The clinic was in a dingy storefront. The waiting room was filled primarily with African-American women and children who lived in the neighborhood nearby plus a handful of white college girls like me.
Check out this article about Romania’s 20-year experiment with a total abortion ban. It turned into a public health disaster. More than 10,000 women died unnecessarily. Many children with birth defects were born. The state set up huge orphanages for children whose parents couldn’t take care of them, including many with severe disabilities. Romania tried this because they wanted to boost the birth rate. The birth rate almost doubled initially, until women figured out how to get around the band. Rich women could get abortions; most of the burden of this law fell upon middle class and poor women, who didn’t have the money or connections to get abortions.
If people really want to reduce the number of abortions, we should make contraception and the morning after pill cheap or free, and we should teach medically accurate sex education in the schools. They are not protecting the lives of the unborn. They are protecting the patriarchy. In Arizona, pious, pro-life Republicans are fighting hard to protect child predators— rather than supporting the victims of child sexual abuse.
If Arizona were truly a “pro-life” state, we wouldn’t force thousands of Moms and their children to live in poverty. We would provide food security, housing security, financial security and a quality public education system.
We can’t be complacent. We have to push back and protect our rights.
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