Falling Reproductive Rights: A Sign Of An Era Of Regressing Women’s Rights

Among all the rights and liberties righteously afforded to an individual within a given society, none survive without the unconditional liberty of bodily autonomy. It is the ownership over one’s body to act and move as one desires that renders social activity possible in all its forms. Simply put, if one does not own oneself first— one then owns absolutely nothing.

So when the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24th 2022, effectively ending a 50-year federal constitutional right to abortion, it legalized forced pregnancy and birth in a country with no universal childcare, no access to free birth control, no paid family and medical leave, no mandatory comprehensive sex education nationally, and one of the highest rates of maternal mortality rates among developed nations. That is a bold move to be making under those conditions. Let us not be fooled into believing that this constitutes a moral choice on the part of U.S. Supreme Court Justices aimed at protecting the unborn. If life was our primary concern, we would turn our attention to issues such as gun regulation, domestic violence, healthcare, food access, and foster care. It will always ring true that sustaining and supporting the life that exists is a sounder option than legislating against it. Our moral obligation does indeed rest in the former and no medical research, religious teaching, or political party viewpoint could reverse that.

Perhaps more importantly though, the bodily autonomy of women, trans, and non-binary folks is just not ours to dictate. And there is no complex philosophical argument behind this thought. Simply put, no single entity has the right to use one’s body against their will. As an activist said, when people die, they cannot be forced to donate blood, organs, or marrow. One’s organs cannot be harvested after their death without their explicit, written, and pre-mortem permission. The divisive and seemingly multi-faceted conversation we have been having— does not matter. It doesn’t matter whether our conversation concerns a fertilized egg, a fetus, a baby or the most promising prodigy among us. It doesn’t matter where life begins or whether a fetus is a human being. None of it does, in fact, matter. We cannot deny bodily autonomy to a section of our society for if we remove their ability to own themselves, we simultaneously dilute their humanity.

Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the country has witnessed a Louisiana woman being denied an abortion after her fetus was diagnosed with a fatal condition, a court in Florida blocking a 16-year-old from getting an abortion on the basis of not being “sufficiently mature”, and various states banning the procedure. The era of regressing women’s rights unfolding before our eyes is also both a racial justice issue for Black women subjected to the country’s maternal mortality crisis and an economic one for people pushed into scarce financial futures they did not chose. And the sum of this reality will domino onto the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, people of color, young people, and those living in poverty.

So it is now, more than ever, that history demands that we build the political power necessary to redeem abortion’s rightful place in healthcare. Let us vote for the school board member who will institute a comprehensive sex education curriculum. Let us vote for the judges who will hear cases brought against women and stand by their choices. Let us vote for the state legislators who will fight for abortion rights to be codified into law. And when they are elected, let us hold them accountable to the premise of equality because when bodily autonomy falls, every liberty follows.