Legal, safe abortions already hard to find

The Supreme Court is due to hear arguments on Feb. 17 about the legality of the ban on the intact dilation and extraction abortion procedure (misnamed “partial-birth abortion”) that President Bush signed in 2003. This will be the first abortion case before the court since right-winger Samuel Alito joined it. The court will issue its ruling in the spring.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled the ban illegal on Jan. 31 because it failed to include an adequate exemption to protect pregnant women’s health. Courts in the 2nd circuit in New York and the 8th circuit in St. Louis had previously issued similar rulings, which the U.S. attorney general has appealed.

Amid much speculation about how the court will rule with two new rightist
justices—John Roberts and Alito—it’s important to note that in 2000 the court voted 5 to 4 that the ban was illegal precisely because it failed to provide protection for women’s health. By signing the 2003 bill without the needed protection, Bush thumbed his nose at the 2000 ruling. He smugly assumed that by the time the identically worded ban came before the court, he would have appointed anti-abortion justices.

This case is a litmus test for Bush, the Republican Party and all their misogynous, reactionary, holier-than-thou followers who seek to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion in 1973. Already legislatures in five states—Kansas, South Dakota, Georgia, Ohio and Tennessee—are considering laws outlawing abortion.

‘Bad old days’ are back

Dire predictions in the corporate press that overturning Roe v. Wade will send women back to the “bad old days of back-alley abortions” don’t take into account that the bad old days are already here for millions of women.

Legal abortion doesn’t really exist for many poor, young, rural women, who are disproportionately African American and Latina. Laws in 32 states requiring parental consent restrict these women’s rights. Often the only education they receive in school about sex is abstinence-only misinformation. And they’re vulnerable to the growing social pressure stigmatizing women who seek abortions.

Young women also lack access to affordable, needed health care and birth control. The cost of an abortion—around $380 for the past 20 years—is out of reach for most teens or a single mother working for the $5.15 minimum wage. The need for many abortions could be averted if women could buy emergency contraception over the counter. This alternative is now available only with a doctor’s prescription.

The Alan Guttmacher Institute reports that only 13 percent of U.S. counties have abortion providers. Three states—North and South Dakota and Mississippi—have only one. The African-American administrator at the Mississippi clinic said in a 2005 PBS special that for young Black women in Mississippi, “it’s as though Roe never happened.”

Some hospitals report that they are seeing 12 to 20 women a year who have tried to induce abortions by taking quinine pills with castor oil or douching with caustic products like bleach. “They are underage or poor women mostly, and a few daughters of pro-life families,” reported mediagirl.org. (Feb. 3)

Deva Skydancer was recently convicted in Greenfield, Mass., of performing an illegal abortion. (masslive.com, Feb. 2) She was charged with practicing medicine without a license when the young woman on whom she performed a menstrual extraction developed an infection requiring hospitalization. The sentence of two months’ probation and a $500 fine could have been much harsher, but the judge acknowledged that the young woman agreed to the procedure and Skydancer had no previous record.

Last summer Geraldo Flores was sentenced to life in prison for so-called “fetal homicide.” (Texas is the only state with such a law.) Flores’ teenage girlfriend tried to self-abort after receiving misinformation about obtaining a legal abortion from a right-wing “crisis pregnancy center.” She then asked Flores to kick her belly, leading to stillborn twins.

Michigan is prosecuting another young man after his girlfriend, who also received misinformation about a legal abortion from a private physician, asked him to hit her with a baseball bat, leading to a miscarriage. Michigan and Texas have strict parental-consent provisions.

Reports indicate more high school students are hiding pregnancies from their friends and family and then abandoning the newborns. Despite a 2001 New Jersey “safe haven” law, about 20 babies have been illegally abandoned. “The anti-abortion movement in this nation has largely succeeded in making birth control and abortion for young women taboo topics,” reported NorthJersey.com. (Jan. 19)

Even worse, it criminalizes the young women. On Feb. 9, Zehra Catalbas, a senior in Mount Sinai High School on Long Island, was charged with second-degree manslaughter after she gave birth, the baby died, and she sought medical care at a hospital. When Suffolk County police told her parents, her father had a heart attack. The young woman and her family are in dire need of health care counseling and community support, not indictments.

The real crime in these cases is state inter vention. Young, vulnerable, distraught, misinformed, unemployed or poor young women and men lack the social, economic or cultural support to make informed decisions. They should not be imprisoned because this capitalist, patriarchal, unjust social and economic system failed them. The lack of reproductive rights for all women only exposes the class, racist, anti-gay divisions in this society.

A strong, mass, united movement with women of color, youth and lesbians in leadership is needed to fight for full reproductive freedom for all women. That must be an integral part of the struggle for socialism in this country.