U.S. Politicians Use Pandemic As Excuse to Attack Abortion Rights

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abortion restrictions, COVID-19, misogyny, pandemic, Supreme Court, Texas, TRAP laws, United States

Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder and CEO of Whole Women’s Health. Miller was the lead plaintiff in suing Texas to stop newly passed extremely restrictive laws designed to force the closure of abortion providers. In 2016 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that those laws were unconstitutional. See the post “Cautious Optimism after a U.S. Supreme Court Decision”

It’s happened again. All reputable commentators are agreed that the medical and social consequences of the coronavirus pandemic will disproportionately affect the poor and people of color. Yet politicians in Texas, Ohio, Mississippi and elsewhere are seizing upon the excuse of the pandemic to make further attacks against the reproductive rights of the most vulnerable populations. Texas, for example, has banned all abortions other than to save the life of the woman on the grounds that abortion is a “non-essential surgical procedure.” First, this ignores the fact that an increasing number of abortions are not surgical at all; rather, they are medical. Moreover, the “non-essential” designation by the Texas attorney general flies in the face of the opinion of the experts of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology, who have issued a statement warning against calling abortion non-essential. On the contrary, these highly-respected physicians say that abortion should be viewed as “an essential component of comprehensive health care” and as such should not be subject to COVID-19 restrictions. But of course, the Texas lawmakers and their ilk are less concerned with the public health of their most vulnerable citizens than they are with pushing through increasingly extreme anti-abortion measures.

Amy Hagstrom Miller (pictured above) is the founder and CEO of the Whole Women’s Health group of clinics, three of which are in Texas. Ms. Miller said that her clinics were forced to cancel more than 150 scheduled abortion appointments in one day, despite the tearful pleas of desperate women who needed the procedure, some of whom had traveled hundreds of miles because many abortion providers in Texas have been forced out of business by the state’s TRAP laws.

Ms. Miller and other reproductive rights advocates and health professionals have noted that it is absurd for the Texas officials to claim that their bans on abortion are intended to free up medical personnel and facilities to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. If it weren’t for draconian restrictions on abortion providers (insisting that the pills used for medical abortion be administered by a physician in person, demanding that patients make two or even three visits to a clinic for ultrasounds and anti-abortion propaganda lectures, for example), clinics could provide early (up to 11 weeks) abortions with one quick visit. Indeed, as some physicians have observed, the procedure for administering early medical abortion could even be handled online. Thus, the rational non-political response would have been to suspend enforcement of the TRAP laws for the duration of the pandemic.

Many women are likely to think that the coming months are not a good time to have another child. Because of the economic impact of the pandemic, which has already caused massive unemployment and especially affects poor and working-class women, the demand for abortion will probably increase. In addition, there are reports that pregnant women are at higher than average risk from COVID-19, especially if they have hypertension, which often occurs during pregnancy, or gestational diabetes. There are also predictions that the pandemic could last for as long as 18 months, particularly if there are two or three waves of infection. In that case some health care systems in underserved regions would be hard-pressed to handle routine medical matters such as prenatal care and childbirth.

In Ms. Miller’s words: “Abortion is essential health care, and it is a time-sensitive service, most especially now in this public health crisis when many people are already financially insecure and futures are uncertain.” She added: “We cannot sit idly by while the state is forcing Texans to be pregnant against their will” (quoted in the Huffington Post).  On March 25, Women’s Whole Health once again sued Texas in federal court. We can only hope that they will be successful. But time is running out for those women whose appointments have been canceled. They will be forced to spend more time, energy, and money in an attempt to secure the procedure in another state that adheres to the ACOG recommendation that abortion be considered an essential part of health care.

As of this writing, it seems that the epidemic has run its course in China with a death toll of under 3,300. In the U.S. projections are grim. A March 25 report from the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation gave an estimate of 40,000 to 160,000 deaths, assuming a nationwide lockdown. One of the reasons for the human tragedy that’s being played out in the U.S. is that many politicians have refused to respond promptly and appropriately to the pandemic. Instead, they see COVID-19 as an opportunity to advance their anti-women agenda by attacking reproductive rights.

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.

The New Face of Misogyny in the U.S.

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abortion, misogyny, reproductive rights, Trump

President-Elect Trump

My last post was cautiously optimistic about the state of women’s reproductive rights in the U.S., since the Supreme Court had just struck down Texas’ most extreme TRAP laws. Unfortunately, because of the blatantly undemocratic system of indirect voting in the U.S. (that is, the Electoral College), Donald Trump, who received 2.84 million fewer votes than the “losing” presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, is destined to enter the White House in January 2017. Trump is an unrepentant misogynist who has boasted about forcing himself on women and groping their genitals.

Trump was supported by sexist, racist, homophobic fundamentalists who have taken his supposed victory as a signal to rush into law a barrage of measures limiting women’s rights over their own bodies. Take the example of Ohio, whose state legislature just passed a bill banning abortion after a fetal heartbeat has been detected (this generally occurs between six and eight weeks’ gestation — before many women even know they’re pregnant). Numerous other state legislatures are contemplating similar bans, and at least four states have “trigger bans” in place. These bills automatically criminalize abortion as soon as a Trump-skewed Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade (and thus leaves decisions about the legality of abortion to the individual states).

Trump has committed himself in writing to putting anti-abortion judges on the Supreme Court, passing a national ban on abortion after 20 weeks, eliminating federal money for Planned Parenthood, and making the Hyde Amendment (passed annually by Congress to ban taxpayer-funded abortions) permanent. The potential results of this wave of fanaticism are appalling, and as always, the effects will disproportionately fall on women of limited economic resources and women of color.

Polls continue to show that the majority of the U.S. population supports the legalization of abortion affirmed in Roe v. Wade. Moreover, if we add the popular votes cast in November for Hillary Clinton to those for Gary Johnson and Jill Stein (the two leading third-party candidates, who, like Clinton, strongly oppose increased restrictions on abortion), we find that they received a total of 71.5 million votes as opposed to Trump’s 62.9 million. A sizable majority of voters are opposed to the Trumpist misogyny being promulgated by legislators on the state level.
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Some pundits are predicting that Trump’s disregard for anti-corruption laws will get him impeached sooner rather than later. But his removal would in no sense help women because the Vice President-elect Mike Pence is even more rabidly anti-reproductive justice than Trump is.

In many ways the U.S. is a pariah of human rights on the international stage. Domestically as well, the country seems destined to enter a dark age of human rights abuses of women — unless a resistance movement can gain force.