The reversal of Roe v Wade rolls back rights held for half a century with devastating consequences across the US and an impact that’s being felt across the globe. It’s time to stand up for abortion rights everywhere, including in Britain.
Abortion clinics in Utah, Alabama, Oklahoma and beyond closed their doors within minutes of the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the 1973 Roe vs Wade ruling on 24 June. The decision ended the US-wide right to abortion upheld for almost 50 years.
Within hours, many states enacted trigger laws to outlaw abortion, even in cases of rape and incest.
Within days, a 10-year-old girl in Ohio who had been raped was denied an abortion under the state’s post-Roe law. Her family had to take her to Indiana to have an abortion.
Legal challenges to state bans will take time, but the catastrophic impact of the Court’s decision is already being felt across swathes of the US. It’s expected that eventually 26 states will have laws requiring women and pregnant people to carry an unwanted or unviable pregnancy to term.
Donald Trump has delivered on his promise to his electoral base that he would appoint anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court and they would overturn Roe vs Wade. The Right in the US are ecstatic and anti-abortion campaigners globally are emboldened.
Judge Alito wrote the ruling, which makes chilling reading. He cites legal decisions from a selection of misogynists through the ages to justify the decision. One Henry de Bracton from the 13th century is quoted saying a person who has ‘struck a pregnant woman, or has given her poison, whereby he has caused abortion, commits homicide’. Another legal mind quoted, this time from 1602, described abortion as ‘pernicious’ and ‘against the peace of our Lady the Queen, her crown and dignity’.
Then there’s Sir Matthew Hale, cited several times, who described abortion as a ‘great crime’. Hale was a 17th-century English judge who established a legal precedent that rape was not possible in marriage. He also sentenced two elderly widows to death for being ‘witches’.
These ‘learned’ opinions led Alito to assert that, until the latter part of the 20th century, the right to abortion was ‘entirely unknown in American law’. So what happened in the latter part of the 20th century? The 1960s happened. The era of mass movements against racism, war and oppression in the US and internationally shook the status quo and demanded change. The women’s liberation movement was part of these struggles. It both reflected the changing position of women in society and their expanding expectations, and accelerated demands for equality and freedom in every area of life.
However, in the view of the Supreme Court, the gains those movements made are an aberration. Instead, we should accept the rights – or more correctly the lack of rights – we had in the 17th century. By a cruel logic, centuries of injustice are invoked to justify denying rights today, and the judges are not stopping at abortion.
Judge Clarence Thomas, who has waited 30 years for this moment, wrote a concurring opinion citing three cases he declared should be reexamined: same-sex marriage, sex between men and contraception. ‘We have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents’, he declared.
This is not over.
Yet whatever the anti-abortion lobby does, history tells us that bans don’t stop abortions, they just push them underground and make them dangerous. This victory of the so-called ‘pro-life’ lobby means women will die. This is despite the fact that, in contrast to 1973, medical abortion pills can be used very safely, via telemedicine or self-managed abortion. In fact, Republican states have already put in place over 100 measures to restrict abortion medication, precisely to block this safe way to end a pregnancy.
So women have to drive, fly or take a Greyhound bus across state lines like criminals on the run to access medical care that was legal only weeks ago. Those who will suffer the most will be those who don’t have the money or ability to travel or access safe abortion advice. Working-class, poor and African-American women, rural women, migrant women will be the ones forced into using unsafe methods to end an unwanted pregnancy.
It’s not simply about the ‘backstreet’. Women will also die in modern hospitals because a law that prioritises the foetus will deny them an abortion, even when a pregnancy becomes unviable or when their life is at risk. This is not speculation. Women have died in hospitals in Ireland, Poland and in Italy when denied the abortion that would have saved their lives. Doctors scared of prosecution have waited before intervening, until it becomes too late.
Abortion has been a feature of every human society and for most of history was not illegal. It’s the 21st century, yet we see this common and safe procedure criminalised, used as a political tool and steeped in stigma, even when legal. Abortion is depicted as a fundamental rejection of what is still portrayed as women’s ‘natural’ role in the family as child bearers and carers.
In Britain, over 200,000 abortions take place every year under conditions set by the 1967 Abortion Act. These conditions, for example if two doctors consent, created exceptions to the 1861 Offences against the Person Act, which made abortion a criminal act punishable by life imprisonment. The 1967 Act – never extended to Northern Ireland, which only won legal abortion in 2019 – ended backstreet abortions and stopped women, mainly working-class women dying. However, the 1861 Act underpins abortion law in England and Wales to this day and is still used to prosecute women.
Abortion rights here have overwhelming majority support; the anti-abortion lobby is small but it is vocal. In the wake of the Roe decision, Tory MP Nadine Dorries stated her desire to cut the time limit from 24 to 20 weeks, another, Danny Kruger, declared that women do not have ‘an absolute right to bodily autonomy’. Jacob Rees Mogg MP described abortion services as the ‘saddest part of modern British life’.
If only he were more concerned about living children going hungry.
Decriminalisation of abortion in Britain is essential to ensuring these politicians can’t roll back our rights. Criminal law has no place in our health care.
Across the US, activists fighting for abortion rights are calling for a summer of rage. I say let’s join them.
Judith Orr is author of Abortion Wars: The Fight for Reproductive Rights and vice-chair of Abortion Rights in the UK.
Abortion Wars: The Fight for Reproductive Rights by Judith Orr is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £13.99.
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Image: Demonstration in support of Abortion Rights arrives at the US Embassy, 9 July 2022, taken by Judith Orr