United States reaffirms the right to abortion, despite opposition

News

Since abortion legislation was passed in 1973, Texas has been at the forefront of the battle between “pro-choice” and “pro-life” America.

No one here has forgotten that it was in Dallas that the huge legal and ethical battle was launched leading to the famous Roe v. Wade ruling of the US Supreme Court.

Since then, the battle over the right to abortion has always been hardest fought in this vast conservative state.

The pro-life camp, which considers abortion to be an irresponsible and criminal act, has been working, successfully, to reverse the situation at a state level, pushing through a barrage of laws and amendments making life very difficult for abortion clinics.

The lack of funds, doctors and adequate security makes the procedure impracticable in large swaths of the US, despite the federal legality of abortion.

Against this background, a new ruling, delivered at the end of June by Supreme Court Justices, has brought an unexpected turnaround in the situation for abortion right defenders.

Like in 1973, it was a Texan legal battle that climbed every rung of the US justice system and landed on the desks of these top judges, (usually nine, but their number has been reduced to eight following the death in February of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia and the obstructing of a new appointment).

The judges’ decision has nullified legislation, passed in 2013, that has severely impacted family planning centres in Texas. It required the clinics to meet the same exceedingly demanding health and safety standards as ambulatory surgery centres. It was a measure designed to asphyxiate the clinics, and it worked.

Half of the centres in Texas have seen themselves forced to close their doors since 2013, not only in rural areas but also in big cities such as Austin. Texas, with its 30 million inhabitants, was left with no more than a dozen centres, which were closing one by one.

The law also obliged practitioners to be based in a hospital located within a 40 km radius of the clinic, a requirement impossible to meet in rural regions where doctors performing abortions often only visit once a week, sometimes by helicopter, sometimes by car, in total anonymity, given the high level of threat.

Assaults on clinics have, in fact, marked recent history: eleven people have been killed since 1993 in attacks with explosives or firearms on family planning clinics in the United States. The most recent was in November 2015, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, when a man armed with an assault rifle entered a clinic and killed three people.

Women in the rural counties of West Texas, for instance, have to wait several weeks for an appointment and have to drive hundreds of kilometres to get there.

The situation is particularly difficult for teenagers and women who are single, poor or bringing up children alone.

The rural clinics should now be able to reopen, but it will not happen overnight.

“They’ve got to start fundraising, get the doctors back, find a space. It is a long process,” explains Jennifer Ludden, a correspondent for the public radio NPR. The whole Texan health system has to be remodelled.

For Texas, and the United States in general, the implications of the Supreme Court ruling are manifold. At local level, the organisation that filed the case, Whole Women’s Health, which owns family planning centres, is no longer obliged to close its last few clinics and could even reopen those shut down.

"But our infrastructure has been decimated," Amy Hagstrom Miller, the CEO of the organisation and the leading plaintiff in this legal battle, explains on the Refinery29 website.

Miller takes the example of a working, single mother of three, who was eight weeks pregnant when she contacted her clinic. “We had to tell her she had to travel 350 miles to Dallas to have an abortion. She called us about six times during her pregnancy, trying to figure out how to get time off work, ‘how am I going to afford gas, how am I going to travel round-trip, how am I going to get child care?’ and by the time she actually got her ultrasound, she ended up being too far [along] to get an abortion in the state of Texas [because] she was 22 weeks [editor’s note: the limit in Texas is 20 weeks]. The vast majority of people who have abortions already have a child, so they know exactly what it involves.”

Miller refers to obstacles such as the distances women have to travel, the lack of health insurance cover and difficulties taking multiple days off work.

At national level, the decision will have huge ramifications, given that around twenty states with anti-abortion legislation similar to the Texan law (such as Louisiana, Wisconsin, Alabama) will have to fall into line.

The anti-abortion laws in these states are virtually identical, since most of them are prepared by the same Washington-based lobby, Americans United for Life (AUL).

This association, explains Miller, has “a playbook of legislation that they’re trying to introduce all across the country. Each time they introduce bills, they see what works, what didn’t, and then they refine their programs and go to the next state. So it’s really what we’ve come to refer to as ‘copycat legislation’ that’s spreading.”

The Supreme Court may have tipped the scales in favour of the pro-choice side, but this does not mean the pro-life camp is accepting defeat.

Reacting to the recent Supreme Court ruling, Clarke Forsythe, of the AUL, announced in a press release: “Sadly, the commonsense laws that protect women in real, full service healthcare centers won’t be in effect in Texas abortion clinics, but Americans United for Life will continue to fight – in legislatures and in the courts – to protect women from a dangerous and greedy abortion industry.”

Be it in Texas or elsewhere, there is still a battery of laws and amendments undermining access to the right to abortion. Some states forbid abortion after twenty weeks. Others, like Ohio, go as far as to force doctors to make women seeking an abortion listen to the foetus’s heartbeat.

 

This article has been translated from French.