Women’s rights are being rolled back in America – Georgia wasn’t even the beginning

Six states now have a variation of the ‘foetal heartbeat bill’ passed by Brian Kemp this week

Abortion has been a controversial topic in the US for a long time, but in the last year it’s become particularly charged. The 2016 election of Donald Trump emboldened hardline conservatives and evangelicals in the Republican Party, and the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court made a lot of reproductive rights advocates nervous.

Although Trump started off his presidential campaign seemingly unsure about where he stood on the abortion issue, and floundered more than once (at one point he said that women who had abortions should be sent to prison, before backing down when even anti-choicers disagreed), by 2016 he was promising that he would build a “pro-life coalition”. He also said, on becoming president, that he would nominate Supreme Court justices who would help overturn Roe v Wade, the historical court case that legalised abortion in America in 1973.

Since then, federal changes haven’t happened – but plenty of states have started to roll back women’s rights. This week, I wrote my column about the latest piece of legislation signed into existence in the state of Georgia by controversial representative Brian Kemp. The so-called fetal heartbeat bill makes abortions after six weeks illegal, and means that women who do terminate their pregnancies after that time could face life in prison.

There are numerous, obvious problems with this, but one of the most troubling is the fact that the wording of the bill is as follows: “unborn children are a class of living, distinct person … [with] full legal recognition”. When a foetus of just six weeks’ gestation is seen as equal to other people, that doesn’t just open up the possibility of murder cases when women inevitably do seek to terminate their pregnancies via unofficial, backstreet means. It also means that a woman experiencing a miscarriage could be accused of murder, or a doctor helping that woman in a medical emergency. It brings to mind the case of Savita Halappanavar, the woman who died in Ireland in 2012 after the foetus she was carrying died and Irish doctors refused to remove its remains because of the country’s strict abortion laws. Halappanavar contracted fatal blood poisoning as a result.

Georgia is not the only state that has brought in a six-week ban; in fact, there are six. Because six weeks is such a short amount of time, many say that these laws are effective abortion bans. Other states have imposed such draconian restrictions on family planning clinics that they have made it logistically impossible for women living in certain areas to access abortion as well.

Groups representing women and doctors are attempting to take these states to court at the moment, but they may be playing into the anti-choice politicians’ hands. Many of the lawmakers backing extremely restrictive legislation anticipate they will be challenged; they see those challenges as an opportunity to keep progressing a case right up the US legal system, and ultimately into the Supreme Court in an effort to overturn Roe v Wade. The justices who sit in the Supreme Court haven’t outwardly said that they would definitely vote to overturn, but there’s a good chance they might.

Needless to say, it is sometimes difficult – and infuriating – to report on scores of evangelical men rolling back women’s rights across America when you’re a female journalist. The state of New York, where I live, is one of the most liberal places in the country, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know plenty of people here who hail from areas impacted by these rulings or who have family and friends back home living in fear – and of course even my own life could be potentially affected if the case reaches federal level. The most important fight will be fought on the courtroom floor by lawyers now, but as the media we can also contribute with honest and open reporting about what reproductive rights and non-discriminatory healthcare actually means. Being pro-choice means fighting for everyone to be fully informed.

Yours,

Holly Baxter

US comment editor