“Good evening. In a landmark ruling,
the Supreme Court today legalized abortions.”
That was then.
“And I think that January 22, 1973, will be a historic day.”
This is now.
“Hhheeeeyyyyy, save a baby. Oh, oh, oh, oh, stop abortion now.”
The Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision wasn't the end of the fight over abortion rights in the United States.
It was just a bell signaling another round in a lengthy match.
"This fight that we have, we don't have to be having it the way that we're having it.
It doesn't make much sense."
Proponents on both sides of abortion accessibility have pounced out of their corners
and are ready to box it out over the future of this issue.
Now that President Trump has nominated this man for the high court, even more eyes are fixed on Roe v. Wade.
“This Supreme Court nominee, Judge Kavanaugh, is going to destroy women's reproductive freedom.”
“Shut it down so Trump don’t get it! Shut it down so Trump don’t get it!”
“If it were to be overturned, I think it would happen in a very slow way. I don't think
there'd be a big headline one day in the paper. I think, rather, over a series of rulings over the
course of many years, we wake up one day and discover,
‘Heck, you know, Roe v. Wade was more or less overturned.’”
Hey, fam. I'm Imaeyen, and I'd love for you to hit that subscribe button right now,
because we're about to explain what the U.S. would look like in a post–Roe v. Wade world.
And it turns out, we may already have the blueprint to that future.
This is what the United States looked like in the 1970s.
The Vietnam War had generations in conflict.
President Richard Nixon won reelection, and just one year later
Watergate had already begun to consume his presidency.
“Let me remind you that the finest steel has to go through the hottest fire,
and I can assure you, my friends, that this room is full of fine steel tonight.”
And when the 1970s began, women still weren’t allowed to have credit cards.
This was the nation’s backdrop when the Supreme Court’s historic Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion.
But the minute it was revealed, it was contested by anti-abortion advocates.
“In this instance, the Supreme Court has withdrawn protection for the rights of unborn children,
and it is teaching people that abortion is a rather innocuous procedure.”
The decision has been on the books now for 45 years,
and today’s stats show one in four women in the U.S. will have an abortion by age 45.
But erasing Roe v. Wade isn’t the way some anti-abortion advocates view success.
Instead, activists like Eric Scheidler believe throttling it is the best way to neuter it. He
says people who oppose abortion access should focus on chipping away at the
precedent by finding ways to restrict the procedure.
“I think the chances of Roe v. Wade being reversed anytime soon are very low.
It would take just the right sort of case and just the right sort of cultural moment.
I think we're far more likely to see the Supreme Court allow further restrictions on abortion.”
Scheidler says cases like 1992’s
already have done that and he believes they’ve been more impactful than Roe.
In Casey, the Supreme Court ruled that states could regulate abortion to protect
the health of the mother and the life of the fetus.
It affirmed most of Pennsylvania's 1982 Abortion Control Act,
which required a 24-hour waiting period before a procedure and that women be given “informed consent.”
And the pursuit for restrictions didn’t end there.
If Roe ended right now 22 states are likely to end abortion
thanks in part to trigger laws. Those are laws some states have passed
that say the procedure is immediately outlawed in the even Roe is overturned.
The states most likely to eliminate access are concentrated in the south and midwest.
Even right now there are cases working there way up the system to help restrict Roe’s precedent.
“There are any number of measures that the Supreme Court has allowed over the years to restrict abortion and
regulate abortion in some way or another. And the standard that they're using now isn't the sort of
arte blanche of abortion on demand that we saw in Roe v. Wade.”
Scheidler admits that even if Roe were reversed immediately, it wouldn’t mean
the end of abortion access in the U.S.
The choice would just revert back to the states. That’s where you’d see the difference.
Today, 42 states require licensed doctors to perform abortions.
And that Pennsylvania law I mentioned earlier – in total, 27 states require a woman to wait a specified amount of
time between when she receives counseling and when the procedure occurs.
Author and attorney Michelle Oberman says these differences impact women differently
depending on their financial status.
“The correlation between abortion and economics is crystal-clear. Women have abortions when they feel
that they cannot afford to have another child, or to have a child, and we see that playing out
when we look at the statistics of who has abortions in this country.
The poorest 13% of women in this country have over half the abortions in this country.”
Around 75% of abortion patients in 2014 were poor or low-income. Fifty-nine percent had at least one birth.
”The way in which we frame the debate as sort of as a symbolic matter actually
diverges pretty dramatically from the way in which abortion plays out.”
Oberman, who has spent years studying the issue, says restricting abortion access disproportionately affects
the financially insecure and adolescents, because wealthier people can afford to travel to areas
where the procedure is available.
They can travel out of state if they need to do so. They can afford to take days off work.
Abortions restrictions don’t thwart them as much.
That disparity doesn’t bother Scheidler.
“I don't really see a problem with anyone having difficulty getting an abortion.
I think that's good. I think it should be very difficult.”
Like many people, Oberman says she once assumed that if abortion
was illegal in a country, then the nation would see fewer incidents of it.
“Abortion rates actually are higher in countries with the strictest laws around the world.”
“Even if abortion is completely against the law, it doesn't go away. And we know this from looking at countries
around the world like El Salvador, where abortion is completely banned, with no exceptions.
And the abortion rate in El Salvador is actually higher than it is in the United States.”
El Salvador is a place where abortion has been completely outlawed since 1998.
Women and girls face a prison sentence of between two and eight years for having an abortion.
It’s a place where clandestine abortions are common
and where a woman named Teodora del Carmen Vásquez spent
11 years in jail for the stillbirth of her child.
El Salvador is one of six Latin American countries with total abortion bans.
And generally speaking, the Global South has the world’s most restrictive abortion laws.
The lowest abortions rates are in North America and Europe, with northern Europe having the lowest rates.
Many European countries also have federally paid family planning programs ranging from 35 weeks to a year.
France gives expectant mothers 16 weeks off. Germany allows mothers to take up to three years off.
Oberman believes having this type of support for pregnant parents is what contributes
to those decreased rates of abortion.
Scheidler says he’d like to see any support that decreases the number of procedures.
“I'm happy to see any kind of measures that would assist families, that would make it more possible
for women to choose life for their babies. You know, it's often made out that, you know, everyone who is opposed
is, you know, also opposed to healthcare or opposed to any kind of program, any kInd of social programs.
And I just don't see that to be true. Not from where I'm sitting in, it certainly isn't my position.”
Scheidler has always been anti-abortion, but not always conservative.
He voted for Bill Clinton, and for a decade identified as an atheist.
And though he doesn’t believe it’s fair to compare the U.S.’s abortion outlook to countries like El Salvador,
he did say a U.S. with strict abortion laws would probably look more like Ireland.
Until May 2018, Ireland had a nearly total abortion ban.
Ireland has a low abortion rate – 17 per 1,000 women.
Ireland also has public healthcare and six months’ paid maternity leave.
Global comparisons aside, if Roe were reversed, there’s one big reason the U.S.
wouldn’t go back to looking like it did before the ruling.
“The biggest change since 1973 in terms of illegal abortion is the advent of abortion drugs.”
You see, even in places where the procedure is restricted, if there’s internet access,
then there’s accessibility to abortion drugs with a simple search.
But Oberman warns that increasing abortion restrictions will have a tangible cost.
“There will be women who do die from illegal abortion, though. So let's just be clear about that,
because there'll be a population of women who don't access abortion drugs so easily, find out too late in their
pregnancy or who take the wrong drug at the wrong dose. And we also know, we can
predict who those women will be. They'll be the poorest and most marginalized.”
The future of reproductive rights is threatened regardless of Roe v. Wade’s future. And the
truth is that, for some women in some states, a United States without abortion access
already a reality. It’s just that now, many more women are at risk for being in that same pool.
Hey fam. Thanks for much for watching. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe.
This is one of just many stories we'll be doing leading up to the midterms.
And we want to know what you want to see from us. Give us your story idea in the comments.
And we'll see you next Sunday. Bye.