Roe vs Wade Series | Editorial: On Abortion in America | Kevin R. Pennington

Source: Wikimedia Commons 

 

Abortion is not an easy topic to talk or write about. Passionate opinions rage on both sides of the issue. On one side are the predominantly white male lawmakers and the conservative voters who elected them and on the other side are the women whose healthcare and reproductive freedoms are being ripped away. For decades, Roe vs. Wade gave women the federal right to an abortion in the United States. Many states like Texas passed extremely restrictive laws, but they could not ban abortions entirely. In February 2022, the unthinkable happened. The United States Supreme Court overturned the longstanding Roe vs. Wade ruling, which provided for women's reproductive freedom and the federal right to an abortion.

 

The Roe vs. Wade precedent gave women across the nation the right to make informed medical decisions about their own bodies, including the right to end an unwanted pregnancy. However, in a post-Roe America, instead of women having a single federal framework for abortion issues, each state may regulate women’s reproductive rights individually. While it sounds good on paper for each state to make their own abortion laws, what overturning Roe vs. Wade has done is open a deluge of extremely restrictive abortion laws in conservative states like Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida. These laws are so restrictive that the window of time when an abortion can legally happen is often over before the woman is aware that she is pregnant. Other states passed Heartbeat laws that require physicians to detect if there is a fetal heartbeat before performing an abortion.

 

The nation’s most stringent abortion laws are in Texas. There are currently no legal abortions allowed in Texas. The state’s abortion law is designed for zero tolerance and gives no exemptions for rape or incest victims. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, the political figure who spearheaded Texas’s abortion law, states that women who are raped can use the Plan B pill, which is a medication designed to prevent a pregnancy during a tiny and specific window of time. He also suggested that Texas law enforcement will prevent rapes from occurring in the first place, however, the data does not support Abbot’s aspirations for Texas law enforcement. Instead, Texas is one of the states with the most rape complaints.

 

Drugs like mifepristone, an FDA approved abortion medication, are currently the target of GOP politicians who seek to leverage legislation against all abortion methods. In April 2023, the Supreme Court ruled mifepristone will remain widely available and blocked a lower court’s ruling to restrict or ban the drug, however, they also sent the case back to the lower court, even though it is very likely to be sent back to the Supreme Court.

 

In various conservative states, abortion is so weaponized that doctors are afraid of what will happen to them if they perform abortion procedures. Many of these laws hold physicians responsible, with jail sentences for conducting the procedure. This causes most doctors to resist performing necessary abortions. There are examples of women not receiving care, even in the narrow cases that an exemption permits, because the hospital staff were unsure how to legally proceed with the operation. Often, the decision for abortion is not decided by medical providers who take the mother’s health into account, but by lawyers who lean toward legal safety for the doctor instead of the medical safety of the patient needing the procedure.

 

CNN reported on this abortion issue in an article dated April 25, 2023. The CNN article details problems in Oklahoma where contradictory laws filled with non-medical terminology make it impossible for hospitals to perform abortions, even when it should be allowed due to an exemption. The CNN article describes a study where researchers called hospitals acting as prospective patients and asked the hospitals what the abortion policies were. The researchers got different answers from the various hospitals. The CNN article states:

 “The researchers said that none of the hospitals they contacted in Oklahoma was totally able to articulate clear, consistent policies for emergency obstetric care to potential patients.”

 

In the state of Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis, who has announced a run for President, recently signed a law banning abortions after 6 weeks instead of the state’s previous 15-week ban. However, the 6-week ban was struck down by the Florida Supreme Court.

 

In the direct aftermath of Roe vs. Wade ruling, the editors of the Sunflower Collective curated a literary response to the Supreme Court’s decision with plans to release an anthology. The anthology is still moving forward, however, due to the overwhelming importance of these poems at this particular juncture in time, we made an editorial decision to release them on the Sunflower Collective blog. The collection of poems, mostly written by women, including Suzi Kaplan Olmsted, Lynne Bronstein, and Amy Garner, as well as other important poets, raise their voices against the patriarchal hegemony that treats women as a lesser sex and regulates their reproductive rights. 

 

Kevin R. Pennington

Co-Editor of the Sunflower Collective

July 4, 2023