U.S. Supreme Court to Overturn Roe v. Wade

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abortion, abortion laws, anti-abortion movement, reproductive health, U.S. Supreme Court

Law students demonstrate at the U.S. Supreme Court after learning of the leaked anti-abortion decision.

For many months, ever since far-right jurists became the majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, it has been expected that the Court would soon either drastically curtail or entirely overturn the historic 1973 decision Roe v. Wade that recognized women’s abortion rights.  On May 2 the most dire predictions were confirmed.  A 90-page draft copy of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority ruling completely overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked to the press.  That the draft document made its way into the media prematurely is an unprecedented scandal in and of itself.  But the contents of the document are far more shocking than the circumstances in which it became known. In the most dramatic rejection of women’s rights in recent U.S. history, the Court majority will reverse Roe v. Wade and the past fifty years of Federal court decisions reaffirming reproductive rights. The U.S. will join Poland, Nicaragua and El Salvador as one of only four countries that have rolled back access to abortion during the last three decades.  Meanwhile, since 1994 fully fifty-nine countries have expanded the conditions under which abortion is legal. 

This blog has quite a number of readers from outside of the U.S., so it bears repeating that the Supreme Court decision will not criminalize abortion in the entire U.S.  The woman-friendly “blue” states, including most states in the northeast and coastal west of the country, will keep abortion legal and accessible.  But their resources are likely to be strained by having to accommodate women fleeing the draconian restrictions in the misogynist “red” states.  The hospital system of my state of Washington, for example, has been greatly taxed by an influx of seriously ill Covid-19 patients who contracted the virus in the neighboring state of Idaho, where the anti-mask and anti-vaccine movement is strong, and is generally supported by Republican political authorities. Now, with the Supreme Court opening the door to anti-abortion legislation in Republican-controlled states, clinics in Washington are anticipating an increase of Idaho women fleeing to our state to escape Idaho’s abortion ban. 

As many commentators have noted, the woman-friendly states generally protect access to a full range of reproductive health options.  In addition to abortion, often with state-assured financing for poor women, such states also provide access to low cost or free contraceptives, prenatal and postnatal care, and other services for infants and children.  Meanwhile, the misogynist states such as, for example, the anti-abortion stronghold of Mississippi (whose recent legislation restricting abortion Alito cites favorably), have some of the worst statistics in the country on women’s and children’s health and welfare. 

In the ruling Justice Alito blames his predecessors’ decision in Roe v. Wade for inflaming divisiveness in the U.S. over the abortion issue. The truth of the matter is that it is the extremist anti-abortion decision by Alito and his confederates that will lead to disputes and conflicts among the states. By throwing decisions on abortion legality exclusively back into the hands of the individual states, the U.S. Supreme Court is exacerbating the already immense divide between the roughly half of the country whose policies and laws provide for reproductive health rights, and those deeply misogynist regions with blatant disregard for the health and welfare of women.  

There is widespread agreement among historians that the worst decision ever made by the U.S. Supreme Court was the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which held that a Black person could not have the rights and protections of a citizen, even in a free state where slavery was not permitted, and, moreover, could be taken to a slave state and re-enslaved. According to the Wikipedia article on the Dred Scott decision, “Although Taney and several other justices hoped the decision would permanently settle the slavery controversy, which was increasingly dividing the American public, the decision’s effect was the complete opposite. Taney’s majority opinion suited the slaveholding states, but was intensely decried in all the other states. The decision inflamed the national debate over slavery and deepened the divide that led ultimately to the Civil War.” Apparently Alito and his fellow rightists on the Court would rather disregard the lessons of history.

A Tale of Two Books

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abortion, abortion restrictions, anti-abortion movement, Crisis Pregnancy Centers, misleading advice, obstacles to abortion, TRAP laws

Recently, I reviewed two books for a librarians’ journal. Although both examine the experiences of U.S. women who wish to terminate undesired pregnancies, the two books couldn’t be more different. Obstacle Course: The Everyday Struggle to Get an Abortion in America, by David S. Cohen and Carole Joffe, is as straightforward as its title. Using first-person accounts by abortion providers, clinic volunteers, reproductive rights activists, and women seeking abortion, the authors chronicle the difficulties that confront women in most parts of the country: a distressing tangle of TRAP laws, long waiting periods, harassment by anti-abortion protesters, and state-mandated falsehoods that physicians must deliver to their patients before an abortion. These obstacles—which of course disproportionately affect women of color, rural women, and the poor—make accessing abortion far more time-consuming, expensive, risky and stressful than it needs to be (and certainly far more difficult than it is in any other industrialized country).

Cohen and Joffe don’t just focus on the negative, however. They also describe the situation in areas of the U.S. where abortion access is routine. In these places reproductive health clinics are not subject to TRAP laws, women seeking abortions are rarely harassed or stigmatized, and state financial assistance is available. Also, in some states early abortion is possible via telemedicine, and in a few jurisdictions abortion by means of medication can be overseen by physicians’ assistants or nurse practitioners. Obstacle Course is readable, nuanced, and comprehensive; if I were still teaching, I would happily assign it to undergraduates.

The second book, The Pro-Life Pregnancy Help Movement: Serving Women or Saving Babies, by Laura Hussey, has a title that immediately reveals the author’s anti-abortion bias (“pro-life” and “saving babies”). Hussey frankly admits her early involvement in anti-abortion activism and her belief that human life begins at conception. Given her own anti-abortion advocacy, it is not surprising that Hussey’s treatment of the crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) is admiring and uncritical. Because the CPCs have received negative press for their deceptive practices and intimidation techniques used against women seeking abortion, they have been rebranded by their supporters as “pregnancy help centers.” Hussey not only accepts the rebranding, but styles the women she surveys as benevolent, religiously-motivated “social reformers” whose opposition to abortion stems from their deep desire to serve women.

In Hussey’s account, CPC personnel distance themselves from the more extreme wings of the anti-abortion movement. Interviewees claim, for example, that they avoid what they euphemistically term “sidewalk counseling” but which personnel and patients at abortion clinics see as traumatizing harassment. CPC employees also claim that their work is non-political, and that they have nothing to do with lobbying for TRAP laws, mandatory pre-abortion viewing of ultrasounds and anti-abortion videos, and other barriers to abortion access so ably chronicled in Obstacle Course. (By the way, Karissa Haugeberg paints a very different picture of the women of the CPCs and their support for and in some cases participation in violent anti-abortion activities; see my review of her Women Against Abortion in this earlier post.)

There are numerous questionable aspects of Hussey’s laudatory treatment of the CPCs. To my mind, most damning is her refusal to take a stand on the junk “science” that the CPCs disseminate to their clients. CPCs routinely claim that abortions cause breast cancer, are more dangerous than carrying a pregnancy to term, negatively affect women’s long term mental and physical health, and so on.

These false claims have been refuted by professional bodies ranging from the World Health Organization to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Yet Hussey portrays the CPC propaganda as having equivalent weight to those refutations. This stance is inexcusable. By spreading medical misinformation, the CPCs give the lie to their claims to be serving the interests of women.

 

The Outrage of El Salvador

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abortion, abortion laws, anti-abortion movement, El Salvador, fundamentalism, human rights, misogyny, reproductive health

Maira Veronica Figueroa Marroquin (center) released after 15 years in prison

The government and legislature of El Salvador have once again shown their blatant disregard for women’s health and wellbeing by adjourning without voting on proposals to weaken the country’s draconian anti-abortion law. El Salvador is one of the remaining five countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to completely ban abortion under all circumstances. The situation is made even worse for women because the law is enforced with exceptional severity and arbitrariness.

In mid-April 2018 the Spanish-language cable network Univision aired a segment on “Primer Impacto” chronicling Salvadoran women’s rights activists’ attempts to get justice for women imprisoned under the law. At least two dozen women who suffered miscarriages or stillbirths late in pregnancy while not under a doctor’s care (in other words, women from the impoverished majority of the population) were initially charged with abortion, a crime bearing a sentence of up to eight years for both the woman and the abortionist. But prosecutors wound up getting the women charged and convicted of aggravated homicide, and they were sent to prison for up to thirty years. Protests by feminist and human rights organizations within El Salvador and throughout the world have succeeded in freeing five of the incarcerated women. But so far the Salvadoran government and judiciary have refused to review most of the cases. Meanwhile, the proposals to grant exceptions to the ban on abortion when the woman’s life is in danger or when a minor is pregnant as a result of rape have once again been stymied.

The bitter ironies in the Salvadoran situation are many. The tiny, densely-populated country has been experiencing an unprecedented upswing in violent criminal activity, in part because of deportations from the U.S. of Salvadoran gang members from Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and elsewhere (young men born in El Salvador but reared and introduced to crime in the U.S.), and in part because of the large numbers of ex-military and ex-paramilitary individuals left unemployed after the end of the U.S.-bankrolled counter-insurgency war against earlier movements for social justice and national liberation. Yet the government seems more concerned with policing women’s bodies and enforcing one of the harshest anti-abortion laws in the world than in trying to control criminal violence.

Another irony: Salvadoran anti-abortion fanatics have had the unmitigated gall to portray supporters of weakening the anti-abortion law as being under the influence of foreigners. The reality is that worldwide most of the funding of the most strident anti-abortionists comes from Catholic or Protestant fundamentalist organizations based in the U.S. The present Salvadoran outright prohibition is only twenty years old and was enacted in 1998 at the instigation of U.S.-based anti-abortion groups. Earlier Salvadoran anti-abortion legislation was not as sweeping, and enforcement was not so vicious.

In the early to mid-1990s it was possible to have discussions of the harmful public health consequences of illegally induced abortion without participants being intimidated and shouted down by anti-abortion zealots. I myself attended conferences in 1993 and 1994 in San Salvador at which speakers addressed the lack of sex education in Salvadoran schools, the horrible consequences for women’s health of abortion under unsafe conditions, the enormous costs to Salvadoran taxpayers, the need for freely distributed contraception, the injustice of safe clandestine abortions being available to affluent but not to ordinary women, and Salvadoran indigenous women’s use of native plants for abortifacient purposes. These conferences were well-attended and well-publicized, and both were co-sponsored by the Salvadoran Women Doctors’ Association. But by the late-1990s throughout Central America the situation had changed. Anti-abortion fanatics, largely funded by U.S.-based organizations, increasingly made it their business to harass legislators, gynecologists, and women’s health clinic personnel. The atmosphere of belligerence and intimidation has deterred many doctors from performing abortions in circumstances in which they would have had no qualms about performing them in the days before the anti-abortion zealots became so threatening. In the words of the independent legislator who proposed one of the bills that would have softened the ban, “There is a lot more tolerance for corruption than there is for discussion on abortion.”

And so the outrage continues. Groups of self-righteous misogynists directed from the U.S. hypocritically and sanctimoniously proclaim their love of (embryonic) life, while Salvadoran women die from clandestine abortions under unsafe conditions, and at least twenty Salvadoran women languish in prison because they couldn’t afford doctors to bear witness to their miscarriages.

A New Book Describes the Women’s Wing of the U.S. Anti-Abortion Movement

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anti-abortion movement, anti-abortion violence, Catholic Church, Catholic women, Crisis Pregnancy Centers, Evangelical men, terrorism

Marissa Haugeberg

I just wrote a review (for a librarians’ journal) of Women against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century by Karissa Haugeberg, an assistant professor of history at Tulane University. At first, I was put off by the subtitle, because the idea of dignifying anti-abortion zealotry with a term like “moral reform movement” is abhorrent to me. I myself would never use such a phrase for the same reason I never call opponents of abortion “pro-life” — like many feminists, I am sickened by the hypocrisy of that term.

As it turns out, however, one should not judge a book by its cover — or its subtitle. This is a nuanced, sophisticated, and balanced account of three decades of anti-abortion activism in the U.S. on the part of overwhelmingly white, largely working class Catholic and Evangelical women. By the end of the book Haugeberg has made it abundantly clear that there is nothing the least bit moral about the terrorist violence of the anti-abortion movement.

Haugeberg argues against the widespread notion that most acts of violence against women’s health clinic personnel have been committed by white Evangelical men. She demonstrates that women were coordinating violent “rescue” actions (vandalizing and bombing clinics and assaulting and terrorizing staff and clients) “long before Evangelical men joined the movement.” In large part, the Catholic women’s early turn to “rescue” violence was prompted by their frustration with most Catholic priests’ and nuns’ disinclination to actively oppose Roe v. Wade. Juli Loesch, for instance, cut off her relations with a group of Benedictine nuns because of their ambivalence about abortion.

Haugeberg repeatedly notes that most of the (Catholic) women who embraced anti-abortion activism initially went to some effort to portray themselves as seriously interested in women’s welfare. The crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) were set up by these women supposedly as a more female-centered alternative to the male-led and Evangelical-dominated anti-abortion groups, which were overtly anti-feminist, if not misogynist, and which put fetal personhood at the heart of their rhetoric.

But the CPCs quickly degenerated. Though still employing a discourse of concern for women’s health and wellbeing, the CPCs have unashamedly turned to “deception, coercion, and terror” in their attempts to prevent women from accessing abortion. CPC personnel routinely lie to women about how long they’ve been pregnant (thus moving them past the time limit for legal abortion in many states). CPC staff show fabricated abortion videos, make outrageously inaccurate claims about abortion hazards, intimidate and terrorize women seeking abortions, and publish confidential information about them and their families.

Haugeberg’s book is fascinating and well written. But it is not an easy read. She uses their own words as much as possible in chronicling violent anti-abortion fanatics such as Shelley Shannon (attempted murderer of Dr. George Tiller and intimate friend of the killers of Dr. Tiller, Dr. David Gunn, and others). Those words are smug and self-righteous, and it takes a strong stomach to read the sanctimonious justifications of their violent attacks.

Haugeberg criticizes the distinctions often made by scholars and the media between supposedly peaceful arms of the anti-abortion movement such as the CPCs and the terrorists who over three decades have killed eleven people, attempted to kill another 26, and committed close to 2000 acts of arson and vandalism. Violent anti-abortion activists move freely among the various factions of the movement, and their terrorism is virtually never condemned by the national organizations. The actions of female anti-abortion terrorists have met with tepid response by state and federal officials as well. All too often, their repeated violent acts do not lead to criminal charges and rarely result in jail time.

Cautious Optimism after a U.S. Supreme Court Decision

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abortion, abortion access, abortion restrictions, anti-abortion movement, reproductive health, Texas, TRAP laws, U.S. Supreme Court, Uruguay

Over the past few days, the news media as well as social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have been abuzz with news of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-to-3 decision in the Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt case. The court struck down the Texas state legislature’s 2013 restrictions on abortion clinics; these restrictions had already caused half the abortion clinics in Texas to close, and threatened many more. A June 27 article in The New York Times called the decision “the court’s most sweeping statement on abortion since Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, which reaffirmed the constitutional right to abortion established in 1973 in Roe v. Wade.”

Justices Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Kagan. There was a gender gap in the 5-to-3 decision. The women justices voted 3-to-0 to throw out the Texas TRAP law; the men voted 3-to-2 in favor of the Texas restrictions.

People interested in women’s reproductive health have heralded the decision as signaling the likely end of most of the so-called TRAP laws (targeted restrictions on abortion providers) so beloved by right-wing state legislators all over the country. Indeed, anti-abortion forces view Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt as a shocking defeat. (The Washington Superior Court ruling against the Skagit County hospital district for failing to provide abortions that I was so pleased about last week seems like very small potatoes in comparison.)

I have to admit that when I first heard of the Court’s decision, I was as ecstatic as anyone else, and did not particularly cavil at the descriptions of Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt as being a death-blow to the U.S. anti-abortion movement. Upon reflection, however, my enthusiasm has become more measured. Such court decisions are welcome, of course. But history has shown us that one cannot rely upon the courts to ensure fair treatment. After all, the Miranda v. Arizona court decision of 1966 (which limited police powers and required that arrested persons be informed of their right to a court-appointed lawyer) has not notably resulted in equal justice for the poor. And anyone who knows anything about the recent history of abortion in the U.S. is well aware that neither Roe v. Wade nor Planned Parenthood v. Casey ensured access to abortion for women of scarce resources outside of certain major metropolitan centers.

Anti-abortion zealots are already regrouping, and strategizing about what their next moves will be. Their onslaught against the health rights of women over the past few decades has been unceasing, and there is no reason to assume that they will view Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt as anything other than a temporary setback. The TRAP laws have certainly been an effective tactic. But women are also denied access to abortion through intimidation of health care professionals and patients at the doors of clinics, cuts in funding to clinics that provide reproductive health services to the poor, and the failure of more than a handful of medical schools to require their students to learn procedures to terminate pregnancy.

It is, of course, far better for abortion to be legal than illegal. But that is not the end of the story. Sometimes a place where abortion is illegal can have better access than certain other places (such as many rural regions in the U.S.) where it is legal. Take, for example, the South American country Uruguay, which in 2012 became the second country in Latin America and the Caribbean (after Cuba) to legalize abortion under a broad range of circumstances. Interestingly, already for a decade or so before legalization, Uruguay had succeeded in drastically reducing maternal mortality from unsafe abortions by means of “before” and “after” appointments for poor women at the public hospital. Physicians would see women contemplating illegal abortions to instruct them in the correct administration of misoprostol/Cytotec, though they would not provide information on how to acquire the drug (which in any case was freely available over the internet). After the women self-aborted chemically, Uruguayan physicians would confirm completeness of the procedure and if necessary perform a uterine aspiration if there were any complications. This subtle skirting of Uruguay’s abortion prohibitions has come to be known as the “Uruguay Model,” and has been informally adopted by doctors in other countries with restrictive abortion laws, such as Uganda, Tanzania, and elsewhere. See the article by Patrick Adams in The New York Times.

Junk Science from the NY Times

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anti-abortion movement, evolution, evolutionary psychology, junk science, sociobiology

For several decades, as women’s reproductive rights in the United States have come under frequent attack, the New York Times has been a staunch and consistent opponent of attempts to ban or drastically limit access to legal abortion. On 15 April 2014, the Times published an op-ed piece by Thomas B. Edsall titled “Abortion Endures as a Political Tripwire.” The essay expressed support for women’s right to abortion and asked why it is that abortion remains such a hot-button issue while certain other controversies that once seemed explosive — notably, gay marriage — have apparently lost political traction.

Unfortunately, in his efforts to find the answer to this question Edsall settles on an explanation that is peculiar, to say the least. He approvingly quotes two proponents of an evolutionary theory that suggests that vehement opposition to abortion is the inevitable result of (male) human nature. Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker and Nebraska political scientist John Hibbing opine that male attempts to limit access to abortion are understandable because, in Edsall’s words, “reproduction is both a core political issue and a core evolutionary one.” In evolutionary terms, males might want to restrict abortion as part of their attempt to, in Pinker’s words, “guarantee paternity, since a cuckolded man is in the worst imaginable evolutionary scenario…”

Edsall appears to have fallen for this bit of pseudoscientific nonsense hook, line, and sinker. Like so many explanations grounded in sociobiology (which proponents now call “evolutionary psychology” in an effort to escape the tarnished reputation of the earlier term), this one fails on historical and cross-cultural grounds.

For one thing, until the 19th century, in most cultures of the world abortion before “quickening” (the first movement of the fetus in the womb at approximately three months gestation) was considered permissible. Indeed, in many places and time periods a woman was not deemed to be pregnant until she announced herself to be so; anything she did before that point to make herself not pregnant (“restore menses” or “restore herself to health” was the way it was often phrased) was her business and hers alone. (I discuss this further in the “A Little Bit Pregnant” chapter of Sex and Herbs and Birth Control.) It is bizarre to categorize current opposition to first-trimester abortion as part of the “evolutionary core” of human actions if this supposed core did not manifest itself in any systematic way until the 19th century.

For another thing, the U.S. is virtually unique in the abortion issue being, as Edsall rightly terms it, a “political tripwire.” Certain parts of the world — such as China, Japan, and most of south and southeast Asia, which together hold about half of the world’s population — have liberal abortion laws and no significant anti-abortion movement. In some places that still have restrictive laws on abortion the laws have been greatly liberalized over the last couple of decades (this is true of Mexico and certain South American countries). In Latin America most opposition to abortion has come from the Catholic Church (which, by the way, did not categorically forbid abortion before quickening until 1869) and Protestant fundamentalist organizations based in the U.S.

It is illogical and unscientific to attribute the strength of the anti-abortion movement in the U.S. to humanity’s “evolutionary core.” Why would evolution apply only to Americans and not to Asians? For all their good intentions, Edsall and the New York Times are doing a disservice by disseminating junk science. A logical explanation of anti-abortion fanaticism in the U.S. should be based not on biology, but rather on historical, political, and sociological analysis of the peculiarities of American society.

Postscript (added 9 June 2014): After contacting Steven Pinker, my husband Neal learned that his views had not been accurately represented by Mr. Edsall. In Prof. Pinker’s email correspondence with Edsall he had written, “I don’t think there can be an evolutionary explanation of opposition to abortion per se.”

Further postscript (added 4 October 2014): The following quotation from the 2010 book Misframing Men by Michael Kimmel (who is founder and editor of the journal Men and Masculinities) was brought to my attention by Tiffany Lamoreaux:

“Evolutionary psychology is not a natural science, but a social science, which is to say it is an oxymoron. It cannot conform to the canons of a science like physics, in which falsifiability is its chief goal, and replication its chief method. It does not account for variations in its universalizing pronouncements, nor does it offer the most parsimonious explanations. It is speculative theory, often provocative and interesting, but no more than that. It is like–gasp!–sociology. And, as in sociology, there are some practitioners who will do virtually anything to be taken seriously as ‘science,’ despite the fact that individual human beings happily confound all predictions based on aggregate models of behavior.” (page 71)