With the passage of the most restrictive abortion bill in the country last week, Alabama joined a wave of states with abortion legislation that bids a challenge to the constitutional right to an abortion set by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973.
Proponents of the anti-abortion bills – from a bill that issues a nearly total ban on abortion to those that ban the procedure once a heartbeat is detected – have long argued that such legislation protects the sanctity of human life.
But some legal experts and women’s studies scholars such as Dr. Jessie B. Ramey see the latest bills as part of a “systematic and decades-long erosion of the right to bodily autonomy for people with a uterus.”
“The conversation about abortion has been framed around the right to privacy, but we need to be talking about the fundamental right to bodily autonomy and a broader framework of reproductive justice,” said Ramey, associate professor of women’s and gender studies and founding director of the Women’s Institute at Chatham University. “As well as a very real risk of death, people with a uterus face major, life-long, negative health consequences from pregnancy and childbirth. In all other cases, we do not permit the use of a person’s body against their will.”
Michele Bratcher Goodwin, the Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine and founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy, pointed to two instances in U.S. legal history where the country has shown that there is “no duty to rescue” anyone – the cases of McFall v. Shimp and Curran v. Bosze.
In McFall v. Shimp, the court ruled that the plaintiff in need of a bone marrow transplant could not force a family member to donate bone marrow, despite the plaintiff’s impending death. And in Curran v. Bosze, the court issued a similar ruling in that a father could not force his twins – who were in the custody of their mother – to donate bone marrow to his other son who had leukemia.
“The very idea that individuals in the U.S. are obligated to save children’s lives, the lives of other people … that’s just not true,” even if someone has the capacity to do so, Goodwin said. “Where we do see antithetical actions in health, antithetical in law, it happens to be consistently exerted against one particular group – women,” notably the poorest women.
