On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court handed down its final decision on Roe v. Wade, overturning a ruling by a Texas court, and making abortion legal in the United States. The ruling came in favor of upholding the Ninth Amendment, which guarantees the right to privacy, unobstructed by government intervention. Forty-three years later, however, the President-elect and Republican Party are threatening to overturn the landmark ruling, which would effectively disenfranchise and threaten the lives of thousands of poor women.
While opposing abortion may be considered by many a matter of moral or religious beliefs, the importance of keeping abortion legal is lost to many. The public health implications greatly outweigh individual moral concerns.
Abortion is one of the safest medical procedures available, and its legalization should be considered as more than just an effort to protect privacy. Until 1973, abortion was illegal in most states and many women died in their attempts to have the procedure performed illegally. Since 1973, the number of abortion related deaths has decreased by 90 percent. The legalization of abortion was a major achievement for public health in the United States. In countries where abortion remains illegal, death due to an illegal procedure remains one of the leading cause maternal fatalities.
The propaganda purported by pro-life supporters threatens to prohibit a potentially life-saving procedure for many women. Some of the myths perpetuated are that abortion can cause breast cancer or that it greatly reduces a woman’s ability to get pregnant or carry a pregnancy to term in the future. This type of rhetoric – which the scientific community has not endorsed – has encouraged many states to suggest or even pass legislation banning or putting strict requirements on getting an abortion in the name of protecting women’s health. In recent years, Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers, or TRAP laws, have been the most commonly used approach to greatly reducing access to abortions. TRAP laws require providers who perform abortions to do so under extremely restrictive circumstances. This may include requiring the provider to operate in prohibitively expensive facilities, which require staffing that is too expensive to maintain, or to be required to have admitting privileges at a hospital. Both circumstances are unnecessary for safe administration of the procedure and greatly reduce the number of providers able to perform the procedure, significantly decreasing women’s access to safe abortion services. In the last three years alone, more than 200 anti-abortion restrictions have been enacted at the state-level.
If Roe v. Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court, millions of American women will face a serious public health crisis.. The onslaught of restrictions and regulations passed recently already places many women facing life-threatening dangers from their pregnancies at risk, and they represent a deliberate political effort to make abortion illegal again. In 2012, Governor Phil Bryant (R-MS) stated that his goal was to “end abortion in Mississippi” after signing an admitting privileges bill into law. The future of women’s health is in jeopardy if this is the goal of our country’s lawmakers and local, state, and federal courts.
