The U.S. Supreme Court announcement came just two days after the Texas Supreme Court had overturned a lower court decision allowing Kate Cox to use an untested medical exemption to the state’s nearly total ban on abortion to preserve her health. The latter decision is the first ominous response to the efforts of groups like the Center for Reproductive Rights to obtain legal decisions regarding abortion and medical emergencies in the 14 states where abortion is now banned.
Legal ambiguity on emergency medical exemptions and harsh criminal penalties leave doctors afraid to act even when a birthing person’s life is at stake. The stories of other women who were denied exemptions for dangerous or doomed pregnancies have become well known due to plaintiff testimony in the CRR court case Zurawaski v. State of Texas, a case in which there has not yet been a ruling.
The close of 2023 also saw the movements for reproductive justice and bodily autonomy compile reports on the losses to women and other birthing people from the anti-Roe ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, medical discrimination against pregnant women of color, and the intensification of pregnancy criminalization of low-income women by states with fetal personhood laws. An updated right-wing ideological offensive against “hormonal” contraception, and new attacks on bodily autonomy, were added to the frightening mix.
Impact of Dobbs decision
The impact of the overturning in 2022 of the constitutional right to abortion, as codified in Roe v. Wade, is only starting to be measured. A November 2023 data analysis by the IZA Institute for Labor Economics, as reported by The New York Times, found that between one-fifth and one-fourth of women living in states with bans did not get one. While many seeking abortion were able to travel out of state or somehow obtain a medication abortion, the data suggests that the increased births took place disproportionately among women in their 20s and among Black women and Latinas, all groups that tend to be lower in income and that face special challenges to travel, taking time off from work, or obtaining abortion medications online.
It is no secret that the offensive against reproductive justice and bodily autonomy is experienced most brutally by those oppressed by racialized practices or facing class bias, and in ways other than lack of access to abortion. A September 2023 report by Pregnancy Justice documents a significant rise in pregnancy criminalization that is tied to the deployment of “fetal personhood” discourse, legislation, and judicial precedent against not only pregnant people of color, but increasingly against poor white communities.
In these communities, women seeking medical help for pregnancy are almost automatically suspected by the system of “child endangerment” and tested for substance abuse, with the results going straight to the criminal justice system.
With this phenomenon, state “fetal personhood” laws come together with the carceral approach of the “War on Drugs” to produce tragedy. According to the Pregnancy Justice report, 17 states have passed laws asserting that “life begins at conception,” and three state supreme courts have ruled that child protection legislation can be applied to fetuses. And even though pregnancy criminalization is associated with substance abuse, one-quarter of recent cases involve the alleged use of legal substances like alcohol, opiates, or nicotine. And in two out of three cases when a child was born to a mother convicted of endangerment, there were no documented negative health outcomes for the baby.
Faced with an alarming rate of maternal and infant death, as well as the closure of more and more obstetrics units in the for-profit hospital systems in Alabama, Black women there have historically turned more and more to free-standing birthing centers that have gained trust in their communities.
In September 2023, the state attempted to impose a de facto ban on these midwife-based facilities, more or less refusing licensing for birthing centers. Within weeks, an Oasis Family Birthing Center v. the Alabama Public Health Department lawsuit won a reprieve for this type of care. While its ban on birthing centers has been stalled, Alabama has opened a new front in the national assault on reproductive justice. This situation, in the face of the new science showing the special dangers of urban heat islands and heat waves to birthing people and infants, is certain to gain importance in the overall struggle to gain reproductive justice.
How to beat back the offensive?
At the same time that the offensive against the autonomy of birthing people monstrously expands, in every state where pro-abortion activists mounted ballot initiatives in 2022 and 2023, they won certain guarantees for abortion. There are at least nine more such efforts planned for 2024. In all cases, these victories were not only the result of referenda procedure but also included large public campaigns for hearts and minds carried out by thousands of activists in neighborhoods, union halls, churches, and community organizations. They discovered in life what the polls confirm, that the majority of ordinary U.S. residents support the right and access to abortion, and that these supporters can be mobilized.
In the face of this reality, in more and more states, the elites who are opposed to abortion, with unlimited funding, are mobilizing to obstruct such referenda. And at the same time, in the very near future, the U.S. Supreme Court may de facto end access to medication abortion in all 50 states with one blow.
A strategy that is limited to fighting with ballot initiatives, bold court cases, and crossing fingers regarding the 2024 elections is not going to work. Democratic Party politicians have been the most unreliable allies, using party discipline to thwart mass mobilization in favor of an electoral approach that has failed over and over since 1973. Those who wish to establish reproductive justice must learn from other movements around the U.S. and world that have wielded power in a way that has won victories.
In this country, the United Autoworkers Union stopped production to win significant concessions on wages and a just climate transition despite an equally ferocious assault on working people’s standard of living. In Panama, a mass people’s uprising against the exploitation of their country by extreme extractivism defeated their government and one of the largest corporations in the world via months of mobilization in the streets. In the process, they built powerful new alliances among the exploited and oppressed.
And the massive antiwar movement opposing U.S. aid to Israel, while not yet victorious, should stimulate our imagination about the scale and scope of mobilization that is possible. If we choose to prioritize a new strategy of mass movement building, education and mobilization, and independence from the bosses’ political parties, we can change history.
Movements along these lines can shift the frame of U.S. politics and lay the foundation for the longer, more fundamental fight to overturn the capitalist system, a system whose logic demands control over the bodies of birthing people. We cannot wait much longer to launch a new strategic initiative inspired by these models.
>> The article above was written by Christine Marie, and is reprinted from Workers' Voice.
Comments
Post a Comment