Anti-abortion rally: Student activist Mary Carmen Zakrajzek, center with purple hat, asks people from the Indiana Statehouse steps to fight to overthrow Roe v. Wade. The rally drew about 450 people to Indianapolis in January 2022. CNHI News Indiana file/Whitney Downard
Editor's note
This is the second piece in a two-part series. The first piece looked at the Roe v. Wade debate in the Wabash Valley.
Local academics are adamant that if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns a woman’s right to abortion — as a recently leaked draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority draft on the issue indicates it intends to do — American society will become more divided and less safe for women, particularly those on lower economic levels.
In 1973, Roe v. Wade was considered a landmark Supreme Court decision, protecting a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy. In the leaked draft for the decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization for the current Court, Alito declared Roe “egregiously wrong” and that there is no constitutional right to seek an abortion.
Should the opinion hold, more than 20 states will enact “trigger laws” that will go in effect once the ruling is announced, abruptly leaving tens of millions of women without access to abortion. Other states are expected to follow, including Indiana, where Republicans have called for a special session after the Supreme Court decision to change Hoosier abortion laws. Republicans control 61% of state legislative chambers nationwide, compared to 35% for Democrats, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
“It terrifies me, because I’m a historian, but I’m also a woman and the mother of a daughter,” said Dr. Ruth Fairbanks, who teaches history at Indiana State University.
“Access to reproductive care and the ability to control your body is fundamental to accessing any other rights — economic rights, political rights — and so that being threatened is terrifying for me.
“But it’s also terrifying, because reading through this draft opinion and even though the author said he’s only writing about abortion, all of his justifications also threaten access to birth control.”
“There will be a lot of fear going forward,” said ISU sociology professor Thomas Steiger. “More young, desperate woman will end up dead, either through botched self abortions or botched abortions period. The coat hanger was the symbol 50-plus years ago in the push to legalize abortion; those times will return.”
Though it’s been controversial for years, a majority of Americans have long supported a woman’s right to an abortion; there even used to be a sizable number of pro-choice Republicans. Nowadays, however, conservatives and evangelicals opposed to abortion have become increasingly vocal.
Indiana Senator Todd Young said, “I am pro-life and pro-adoption — and I try to back up my talk with action. I serve on the board of directors of a pro-life ministry.”
Larry Bucshon, U.S. Congressman for Indiana’s 8th District, said, “The unborn child has a fundamental right to life that must be recognized.”
The most strident opponents consider a fetus a human life so therefore view abortion as murder. They cite scientific descriptions to back their views: The textbook “Essentials of Human Embryology states, ‘Human development begins after the union of male and female gametes or germ cells during a process known as fertilization (conception).” Still, there are disagreements about abortion even among those who adhere to specific religions. Jews, some Catholics, Buddhists and Muslims tend to support abortion rights.
The threat to reproductive freedom began in earnest in 2016, said Indiana University law professor Jody Madeira.
“You can start with Mitch McConnell [then Senate majority leader] and the fact that while convention demanded he allow President Obama to appoint a nominee and start confirmation proceedings 11 months before the election and that did not happen,” Madeira said. “Some might call that a stolen seat. After the death of Justice Ginsburg, even though there were two months to go before the election, he hustled to get his pick in there.
“It fundamentally changed the dynamics of the court — this exact opinion would not have happened,” she continued. “People expected abortion rights to be walked back gradually, not to be completely tossed.”
Although Alito stated that abortion is not mentioned specifically in the Constitution, Madeira said, “It’s very broad and doesn’t specify every eventuality.”
Fairbanks, however, takes issue with Alito’s assertion that the Constitution did not mention abortion.
“To understand the basis of how this right is protected in the Constitution we should look at the parts of the Constitution that were written after the Civil War,” she said, referring to the 14th Amendment. “It’s a crucial part of understanding how privacy is guaranteed in the Constitution. It was written later, but it’s fully a part of the Constitution and it addresses very clearly an understanding of what it means to be free.
“This was written in order to establish what freedom meant, and the people who wrote and ratified that Amendment very clearly understood that what it meant to be not free was not to control your reproduction, who you marry or how you take care of your children, and those were characteristics of American slavery,” she continued. “After slavery, those rights — the right to control your body and to have bodily integrity respected, the right to control your reproduction — those were very much what people were thinking about when they wrote and ratified the 14th Amendment. It was very much about protecting people’s right to privacy in the matters of family life.”
Some states are not giving women the chance to realize they’re pregnant before their abortion would be illegal. “Red states are passing bills that are a race to the bottom of gestation [periods],” Madeira said. “There are laws saying you can’t get a procedure after six weeks, which is barely when many people know they’re pregnant to begin with.”
Once abortion laws are restricted, an added hardship for many women will be traveling to distant locations out of state still offering the procedure — if their resident state doesn’t ban that, too.
“If you’re poor and want an abortion, it will be very difficult to travel where it’s available,” said Professor David Bolk of ISU’s political science department. “That’s the bottom line.”
“Poor women will really pay the price and many of the states poised to outlaw or who have already outlawed abortions are among the poorer states already,” Steiger added. “So, something of a double whammy.”
Several GOP trigger bans make no exceptions in the cases of rape or incest. Ohio state Rep. Jean Schmidt said this week, “It is a shame that [rape] happens, but there’s an opportunity for that woman, no matter how young or old she is, to make a determination about what she’s going to do to help that life be a productive human being.”
Madeira said, “There’s little consideration of women’s bodies, choices or rights. It’s taking these situations where women are victims of either forcible or coerced or deceptive acts or crimes and saying, ‘Hey, it doesn’t really matter; what we’re prioritizing here is the life of the unborn child.’”
The decision could also endanger other freedoms previously protected by the Court. “You’ll see a rash of laws that target contraception and other individual liberties,” Bolk said. “A lot can be swept away.”
“Alito’s opinion also threatens other rights,” Madeira agreed. “In order to be a right if it’s not in the Constitution, it has to be a deeply rooted in history and tradition, or implicit within the concept of ordered liberty. And he finds that neither is true for abortion. That’s also true of contraception, same sex marriage and private sex lives. Those are not enumerated in the Constitution; it’s setting up a slippery slope to where these rights will also be jettisoned.”
How abortion legislation plays out could have an effect on mid-term elections, the professors believed.
“It should — and I emphasize should — be at the very least a counter to the otherwise difficult political waters coming up,” Steiger said. “An end to Roe should be pretty much a ‘gift’ to Democrats; they should be able to fundraise like crazy and it should bring out the voters. It should. I am hesitant, however, to think that it will, as in my view, Democrats seem feckless when it comes to these kinds of things.”
“Whether it will mobilize the Democratic Party in the mid-term election where they’re expected to lose a number of seats is the million-dollar question,” Bolk said. “It can only help them.” Because of that, he added, “There’s some speculation that the Court will put off its decision for a year, that the case was improvidently granted.”
Regardless of what laws pass, “Abortion isn’t going away,” Fairbanks said. “It’s what system do you want surrounding it?”
Steiger agreed: “Women have always found ways to control their fertility; a society can decide to make it safe or make it dangerous and it looks like we are poised to make it much more dangerous for many women, especially poor women.”
© 2024 Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc.