The latest battle over abortion rights highlights the stark truth that bans and severe restrictions on abortion harm women — physically, economically and mentally. It also highlights an important truth: Roe v. Wade may not have been the right case to protect abortion rights, which are and should be seen as equality rights protected under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, (just as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wanted) rather than a privacy right protected under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Laws that restrict abortions and therefore regulate pregnancy should be seen as sex-based classifications.
Five women sued the state of Texas this week based on the claim that the state’s severely restrictive abortion laws endangered their lives. The experience of Amanda Zurawski, one of the women who brought the case, is instructive. In the suit, she alleges that prior to a doctor agreeing to perform an abortion to end a pregnancy that was no longer medically viable, she had to wait until she developed blood poisoning. Zurawski, in case anyone is wondering, reportedly underwent over a year of fertility treatments to be able to have a child.
Zurawski is but one example. As one study concluded, barring women from obtaining abortions has real health effects: “Women who gave birth had potentially life-threatening complications, such as eclampsia and postpartum hemorrhage, whereas those having abortions did not.”
And beyond the very real physical risks of forced birth, at least one major study found that women who sought and were denied abortions were “more likely not to have enough money to cover basic living expenses like food, housing, and transportation.” In addition, these women experienced lower credit scores, higher debt and more bankruptcies. Remind me again how a bill that bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, like the one proposed in Florida, is “pro-family.”
It didn’t have to be this way. The Supreme…
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