Roe vs Wade overturned: The relentless erasure of women's rights.
They've only gone ahead and done it. I'm not even going to get into why those late SCOTUS appointments were so crucial. You know why. Nor am I going to tackle the absurd pro-life vs pro-gun debate. Because what happened yesterday is all about meddling with women's reproductive rights, it's all about control. But also about social status and race.
This decision winds back the clock almost 50 years, removing the right to safe pregnancy termination from millions of women. Abortions will now be illegal in huge swaths of the US, with no exceptions for incest or rape, and women will be forced to give birth in a country that doesn't provide universal healthcare and where parental and medical leave are unpaid. Inevitably, women from ethnic minorities who are already facing significant health and economic disparities will be hit the hardest. Financial barriers will prevent them from being able to travel to a state where it's legal and safe to get an abortion. As a result, they will either keep the baby, or they will see no other choice than to pursue dangerous backstreet abortions. Either way, this is bound to perpetuate/extend the poverty cycle and widen the social gap.
As a childless 56-year-old white middle-class woman who lives in Europe, none of this affects me directly. But the truth is that the alarming fragility of these hard-won rights affects every single one of us. The end of Roe vs Wade will no doubt embolden anti-abortion movements and the more conservative governments on a global scale, and there is no way of knowing who/what they are going to go for next.
#roevswade #abortion #womensrights #scotus #blog #blogger #beyondthecanvasblog
Hayv Kahraman
Barricade 1”, 2018