Big Question Number Three: Does overturning Roe v. Wade harm our nation? YES. It will weaken our constitutional rights, specified or unspecified. Loss of rights to marry, or the freedoms of speech, the press, or assembly could lead to Autocracy, Fascism, or Dictatorship. Overturning Row v. Wade builds on a pattern of the last several years: ignoring and destroying governmental norms and practices. It will normalize rule breaking. It will weaken laws.
Question: Do we need laws and government?
YES. If we want to have roads to drive on, reliable cars to drive, safe food to eat, or other products we can buy rather than grow or create entirely for ourselves, we need the organization of government. We need it to enjoy publicly funded education or to have access to quality medical care and many other things that we enjoy (if not take for granted) here in the US. Unless we’ve chosen to stay away from society totally, we are part of a social contract. All nations, large or small are social contracts. A governing model is created that allows people to function as individuals or small groups, while hiring government to handle large, society-wide processes.
State and county governments handle local roads, utilities, fire fighting, public education, accreditation for professions, construction standards for buildings, laws for behavior to protect individuals from victimization, danger, and recklessness, policing to enforce the laws, assistance to those who need it, and many other issues. The federal government has officers, courts and agencies to provide for national security, health and safety, the administration of justice, large infrastructure projects, the creation of laws and bills for funding, and monetary policy to encourage a healthy economy. While we could try to use the age-old barter system, it would be insufficient in today’s more complex world where we need to have money, policies, and regulations: we have to have a government.
Question: Did abortion actually become a federal issue?
YES. It’s a long story. The colonies and then the United States observed the English policies, recognizing that the before ‘quickening’ ending a pregnancy was an option to reduce family sizes and to not overburden the finances and stability of the household. Though later not specified in our new nation’s written constitution, this policy was continuously followed for a century. Many midwives and others offered herbal treatments. There were laws; but ending a pregnancy after quickening was not a serious crime.
The marketplace got into the abortion business with abortifacient advertising becoming highly effective in the United States. Current estimates of mid-19th century abortion rates in the US show between 20% and 25% of all pregnancies in our nation were ended by abortions. Before the turn of the 19th century, most abortions were sought by single women impregnated out of wedlock. But reported in limited studies in American medical journals in the mid 1800s, over half of abortions were pursued by married women, and well over half of them already had one or more children.
Also in the marketplace, physicians who were the leading advocates of abortion criminalization laws, appear to have been motivated at least in part by advances in their medical knowledge. Science had discovered that conception started a basically continuous process of development, that when completed produced a new human being. Many physicians concluded that it was just as wrong to terminate a pregnancy before quickening as after quickening; The Hippocratic Oath and the medical mentality of that age to defend the value of human life shaped their opinions about abortion. But doctors had practical reasons to advocate for anti-abortion laws. Abortion providers tended to be medically untrained and not in medical societies; they were considered ‘irregulars’ by doctors wanting to standardize medical care. The more formalized medical providers disliked the competition of the less costly “irregulars.”
States began to make abortions illegal. One reason given for such legislation was that abortions had been performed by dangerous methods including surgery. Though science and technology advanced and abortion methods had improved, most women still would resort to illegal unsafe methods, also known as “back alley” abortions. After the civil war, the blame for abortions was shifting to the developing women’s rights movement though many feminists of the time opposed abortion.
But in 1869, an anonymous feminist contributor wrote about the problem stating that attempting to pass a new law to ban abortions (as such a law didn’t exist at that time), would not be the solution; it would “be only mowing off the top of the noxious weed, while the root remains.” Seduction or forcible sexual assault of unmarried women and marital rape were ills which feminists believed caused the need for abortions, as men did not recognize or respect women’s rights to remain virgins or to decline physical advances. More socialist views among many feminists recognized further the need for abortion services among the very poor (and some even performed those services).
Physicians carried their anti-abortion agenda to state legislatures around the nation, pushing not only anti-abortion laws, but laws prohibiting birth control. Then came the Comstock Law, which made it illegal to produce, publish, or distribute information pertaining to the procurement of abortion, abortion, or the prevention of conception or venereal disease, even for medical students, as such materials were obscene. By 1900, abortion was a crime in every state. But some states allowed abortions in limited circumstances, usually to protect the woman’s life or to end pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. Abortions continued to occur, however, and became increasingly available.
With medical and scientific advances, more reasons to allow for abortions were added in states: protecting the physical and mental health or well-being of the woman, the probability or certainty of abnormalities or deformities in the fetus, or detecting untreatable conditions that would render the fetus unable to sustain life outside womb. But more and more reports of women’s injuries and deaths due to illegal abortions increased the nation’s calls for legalizing abortion. Before Roe v. Wade, thirty states prohibited abortion with no exceptions, sixteen states banned abortion except in certain noted special circumstances, three states allowed their residents to obtain abortions, and New York allowed abortions to those who sought them. With Roe v. Wade, abortion became a federal issue.
Question: Doesn’t the Fourth Amendment protect a person from unreasonable searches and seizures?
YES. An individual cannot be seized, nor can his or her personal records or papers. I would think that demanding medical records would be unreasonable search and seizure, and forcing a woman to surrender control of her body for several months (including the forced endurance of the physical, mentally tortuous, and dangerous delivery of a child she didn’t want to have) is a seizure of her being and her rights. It is also a brutal punishment for committing no offense.
Question: Is Roe v. Wade “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition?”
YES. Looking at US demographic data, 77% of Americans with uteruses are now or have been of child-bearing age during the half-century of Roe v. Wade. And those who are younger (and their parents) have reasonably expectedthe same rights when they hit puberty. This is the history and tradition we all know. It is deeply rooted in our society and in our rights to privacy. None of us live in the eighteenth century. Justice Alito feels that banning abortion is as “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition” as stockades, witch-burnings, and ‘scarlet letters.’
Question: Will overturning Roe v. Wade reduce abortions?
NOT MUCH. While it will reduce the number of safe abortions, it will increase the number of unsafe, illegal procedures. Women of moderate and higher financial circumstance will be able to travel to other states or countries that offer medically safe procedures to terminate a pregnancy. Many poor women are impregnated. Perhaps they can’t afford to add another child to their family, or to lose a scholarship, or to raise a child alone. Others can’t bear the trauma of giving birth to a child of rape or incest, but haven’t the means to secure a safe abortion. Women carrying non-viable or non-living fetuses will be forced to face emotional pain, physical trauma, sepsis, and possible death or serious injury. The poor will be the seekers of cheap, illegal abortions; some will pay with their lives.
(See Question Number Four in next blog)