Rachel Roth, Ph.D., Guest Blogger (Arlington, MA)
This post is part of Blog for Choice 2013, launched by Boston Students for Sexual and Reproductive Justice (BSSRJ)
This post can also be found at:
http://www.momsrising.org/blog/reproductive-rights-and-realities-on-the-40th-anniversary-of-roe-v-wade/#ixzz2IeykSDEi.
When we observe the 40
th anniversary of
Roe v. Wade on January 22, we are celebrating a major milestone in women’s health, equality, and status as citizens. At its core,
Roe stands for women’s right to make important decisions about our own lives.
This momentous Supreme Court decision
protects both
women’s right to have an abortion and women’s right to continue a
pregnancy. And yet, the reality of women’s lived experience often falls
short of the rights pronounced 40 years ago.
Roe built on a series of decisions throughout the 20
th
century dealing with marriage, procreation, and childrearing, including
a 1972 case about the right to use contraception which said that if the
right to privacy means anything, it is the right “to be free from
unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally
affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”
In political circles, the meaning of
Roe v. Wade is usually talked about as “the right to choose” or reduced to the shorthand of “choice.” This
simplistic rhetoric
not only diminishes the profound and fundamental nature of decisions
about parenthood, it begs the question whether it make sense to talk
about “choices” unless women have alternatives to choose from. For
example:
- to get pregnant or prevent pregnancy
- to continue or terminate a pregnancy
- to raise a child or make arrangements for someone else to do so
Forty years after
Roe, the reality for too many women is that these possibilities are severely constrained
Constraints on abortion
One of the biggest constraints is money. For the millions of women of
women who use Medicaid for their health care, for example, the
Hyde Amendment
bans federal funding of abortion. Although the Hyde Amendment initially
targeted women who use Medicaid, its reach has extended over the years
to virtually every woman whose health insurance is part of the federal
budget.
Women who serve in the military or Peace Corps or work for the
federal government – out of luck. Women who rely on the Indian Health
Service – out of luck. Women who are sentenced to federal prison or
immigration detention – out of luck. Women who qualify for Medicare
because of disabilities – out of luck.
All these groups of women, no matter how few resources they may have,
must figure out how to pay for an abortion on their own, even when
their very poverty is what qualifies them for government health
assistance in the first place.
(The official definition of poverty is living on less than
$12,000/year for an individual and less than $18,000 for a family of
three.)
Because of the racial distribution of poverty,
women of color
are disproportionately likely to be low-income and rely on government
sources of health insurance. Women who are young typically have few
resources of their own, and women who live in rural areas, on
reservations or in small towns, face the added difficulty of getting to
an abortion provider whose office may be many miles away.
It would be bad enough if money were the only significant barrier
women had to deal with. But thanks to decisions in which the Court
backtracked from
Roe, states have enacted a
slew of restrictions
that turn the path to abortion care into an obstacle course littered
with hurdles like biased “counseling” and mandatory waiting periods
designed to dissuade women from going through with their decision.
Constraints on parenthood
Despite how difficult politicians have made it to get an abortion,
they haven’t made it particularly easy to raise children. Consider some
of the challenges:
Race and economics matter here, too. The maternal mortality rate for
African American women is three times higher than it is for white women,
for example. Discrimination and policy failures take an especially
heavy toll on women of color, young women, rural women, and all women
working low-wage jobs.
Among the groups for whom motherhood poses the biggest challenge are
women in jail, prison, and immigration detention. Misguided drug policy
and harsh sentencing rules have fueled a dramatic rise in the
imprisonment of women since 1973. Increasingly, women risk arrest and
imprisonment
because they are pregnant.
A majority of incarcerated women have children with whom they struggle to
maintain relationships,
both in terms of preserving their emotional bond and in terms of
preserving their legal rights as parents. If they are pregnant, they
face medical neglect and the prospect of
being shackled when they are in labor and giving birth.
Moving forward: supporting women’s decisions
Women go to school, work, have sex, form families.
One in three women has an abortion at some point in her life.
Six in ten women having an abortion have at least one child.
Because of
Roe, abortion is one of the safest medical procedures. This is one of the most important benefits of legalization.
After 40 years, the availability of safe medical care is the minimum we should expect. To fulfill the promise of
Roe,
we still need public policies that truly promote women’s right to
decide whether and when to become mothers, including policies that
ensure access to abortion and policies that support raising children.
