Keep your moral panic out of my womb: Abortion is a right worth fighting for

If the United States Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, pregnant people will die. We will die in our bathrooms with knitting needles and wire coat hangers in our hands. We will die in back-alley clinics from septic shock. We will die in friends’ beds and on their couches because we couldn’t go home. We will lose mothers and teens and those in between, equally.

Because making abortion illegal does not stop pregnant people from seeking abortions — it simply makes it more deadly. Across the world, unsafe abortions are the third leading cause of maternal deaths., according to the World Health Organization and the Guttmacher Institute.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court began to hear an argument that will challenge a core tenet of the seminal 1973 abortion case: That the Constitution guarantees the right to an abortion up to and until a fetus can live independently outside the womb, typically set at 24 weeks.

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization will require the elimination of the “fetal viability” line that has underscored child-bearing persons’ rights in this country for more than 40 years. The Mississippi law in question allows abortion after 15 weeks “only in medical emergencies or for severe fetal abnormality” with no exception for rape or incest. It will place Americans under similar restrictions that currently hold pregnant persons captive to the state’s whim in Angola, Mauritania, Madagascar, Iraq, Egypt and the Philippines.

“The lawsuit challenges legal restrictions in Mississippi that place burdens on (people) seeking abortion services, including laws that demean, delay and misinform,” according to The Center for Reproductive Rights. “Anti-abortion legislators have implemented this strategy across the country, and these laws and regulations have hit low-income ... rural communities and communities of color the hardest.”

There may be people, maybe even readers of this column, who might say that pregnant people seeking an abortion should die. That it is our punishment for seeking to end a pregnancy. To you, I say that is a vile wish, and I hope you find it in your heart for empathy and compassion for those among us who experience a far different set of circumstances than you will ever face.

At the very least, I say keep your moral panic out of my womb.

Comprehensive health care in this country is a joke if you are anything other than a white, heterosexual, cisgender male, and so abortion rights have always been tenuous. Yet nearly one in four child-bearing persons in the United States will have an abortion by age 45. I can confidently say without hesitation that we know people who have had to avail themselves of those rights.

But far more than the right to abortion, Mississippi’s victory in this case would upend bodily autonomy, privacy and substantive due process rights. With one fell swoop, the right to contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut), the right to be gay (Lawrence v. Texas), marriage equality (Obergefell v. Hodges), trans rights (Bostock v. Clayton County) and the right to an interracial marriage (Loving v. Virginia) could once again be threatened.

Today, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked her colleagues on the nation’s highest bench, “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception? That the constitution and its reading are just political acts?”

The answer is no. And I, and others like me, will once again put our lives on the line to ensure our bodily autonomy is enshrined in our country’s laws — just as our mothers and grandmothers did in 1973.

We deserve agency over our bodies and we deserve leaders who care if we die. Right now, Americans have neither.

This story was originally published December 1, 2021 at 1:58 PM.