A Non-American Perspective on Roe v Wade and Abortion

It's Tuesday, 3 May 2022. Today's headlines look a little like this:

While I’m not American, I’m worried about how these laws will impact all women across North America and around the world. If you know a woman—love a woman, have sex with a woman—you should be seriously concerned too.

I don’t need to tell you the obvious facts. Why must I tell you that women can birth up to one child in any 12-month period while men can impregnate an indefinite number of women in that same period of time? Do I need to clarify the fact that Roe v Wade protects women who become pregnant by rape and/or incest? Must I point out that approximately 73-million abortions are carried out around the world each year, mathematically inferring that 29% of all pregnancies end in abortion? For those who do not—and cannot—procure abortion, where do those children end up? In orphanages and/or foster homes? Are these children adopted by lovely and loving families? Who will adopt these children? It couldn’t be any of the US Supreme Court judges who voted to overturn Roe v Wade as none of them are parents to adopted children.

If we’re going to talk about abortion for the sake of the foetus, it would be reasonable to consider what happens to children when their mothers are unable to procure lawful and safe abortions. It would make sense to ask what happens to children of women who do not—and cannot—raise children. But this is not really about the children, is it. This issue is about women; their bodily autonomy, their reproductive capacity, the population decline, their ‘fault’, and their crimes against their ostensibly natural maternal nature.

I mean, we know this, right? Apparently not.

As feminist scholar Carol Sanger argued in 2017, “the problem of abortion—or more accurately…how abortion is kept problematic—[i]s a matter of law and social practice.” Similarly, Rosalind Petchesky points out that “abortion is the fulcrum of a much broader ideological structure in which the very meanings of the family, the state, motherhood and young women’s sexuality are contested.” If this is what abortion means for society—and ostensibly the US Supreme Court—then women are in a very precarious position. Indeed, abortion represents one thing for the state and another for women who wish to, and do, procure abortion (read: bodily autonomy).

When I was studying for my B.A., my dear friend procured a lawful and safe abortion in Montreal, Canada. She was like most young women with access to subsidised healthcare; she was on the birth control pill. As a result, she routinely engaged in intimate relations with a single partner. Though they were not exclusively seeing each other, my friend enjoyed spending time with this man. On that fateful day, she took her pill at the wrong time (as we all do), didn’t think much of it (as we all do), and lo and behold, she became pregnant.

For my dear friend, the morning-after pill didn’t work as anticipated. After a few weeks, she began to experience symptoms that we rightfully know today as symptoms of morning sickness. Keep in mind that morning sickness symptoms begin around the 6-week gestation period. My friend, my dear friend, was 6-weeks pregnant and she didn’t even know it. I mean, how could she know? It’s not like we women have a ‘radar’, or an ultra-sound machine in our closets, or pregnancy tests on hand. If you think about the ways in which our medical systems handle female menstruation, symptoms like nausea, fatigue, tender and/or swollen breasts, moodiness, bloating, spotting, cramping, weight gain, and constipation are not abnormal symptoms. If you go to your doctor with these symptoms and do not get tested for pregnancy, you doctor would likely tell you to “take and Advil” and send you on your way.

Women are the scapegoats for our medical system. When a woman gets pregnant, it’s her fault that she engaged in unprotected sex. It’s her fault that she didn’t use birth control properly or that she failed to double-down on protections with more reliable contraceptive methods. It’s her sin. It's her deviant behaviour that is to blame; why blame the man for his ejaculation? Wouldn’t that be ridiculous! A man! His fault! His ‘needs’! His virility!

Well, if we’re going to talk about outlawing abortion, it would make sense to legally inscribe child support requirements, right? Wrong. Why would we do that? It is, after all, the woman’s fault for becoming pregnant. I mean, don’t all women possess the maternal gene by virtue of their reproductive capacities? I can just imagine the conversations that go on behind closed doors of homes and medical centres: “You’ll fall in love with her/him once you meet her/him.”

But what if she doesn’t fall in love with her child after carrying it for 36-weeks in her belly? What happens to women who do not want to be mothers? Well, the reality is that for those living in certain states across the US, the Supreme Court’s ‘leaked’ decision could mean that they are quite literally and metaphorically shit out of luck.

History tells us that society tolerates abortion so long as it promotes particular social/legal ambitions. For Plato, abortion was a way to perfect the body politic. For Aristotle, abortion was a tool to limit family size. For those in support of abortion today, abortion is a tool to promote women’s bodily autonomy—but that is certainly not a justifiable social/legal ambition. Instead, the law and society vilify abortion because it attacks the patriarchy and violates society's beliefs on women's duties to serve, as mothers and baby-producers. I mean, if women around the world could (and did) procure lawful abortion, then those women would theoretically have as much bodily freedom as the men whom impregnate them. But that would be dangerous. A ‘free’ woman! Can you imagine that?

If the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade becomes more than a ‘leaked’ document, and laws protecting women’s legal right to procure abortion becomes extinguished. However this will not stop abortion. While this might end legal abortion, illegal abortions will endure as they have for hundreds of years. Some women will be imprisoned while others will face more serious consequences: death. For those who survive and evade their sexist state laws, those women will live in the guilty and shameful shadows of their acts.

In this historical moment, those women who take issue with abortion can rest easy knowing that their right to choose has essentially negated all women’s right to choose. For those men who take issue with abortion, they can seek solace in the fact that despite having absolutely no personal or possible experience with pregnancy, their vicious ideologies have once again negatively impacted half of the human population. It seems to me that for those men and women who take issue with abortion, their trouble with abortion exists insofar as they are not in need of one. And when that fateful day comes—as it does and will—those women will lie in the bed which they made for themselves while those men continue to live their lives scoff-free.

Let me make myself painfully clear: If you support laws that restrict and outlaw women's abortions, YOU are the problem. Your individual choice to not procure abortion is no different than another individual's choice to procure one. You are not special. Your opinion is not worthy of choosing what your neighbour should, and could, do with her body. Put simply, you should be ashamed of yourself.