“A pregnant Plano, Texas, woman argues that she has a right to drive in a highway lane reserved for vehicles with two or more passengers. At 34 weeks pregnant, Brandy Bottone was pulled over by police while driving in a high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane on Interstate 75 South. When asked if there was anyone else in the car, Bottone pointed to her stomach and said “my baby girl,” she told The Dallas Morning News:
“One officer kind of brushed me off when I mentioned this is a living child, according to everything that’s going on with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. ‘So I don’t know why you’re not seeing that,’ I said.
“He was like, ‘I don’t want to deal with this.’ He said, ‘Ma’am, it means two persons outside of the body.’
“He waved me on to the next cop who gave me a citation and said, ‘If you fight it, it will most likely get dropped.’
“But they still gave me a ticket. So my $215 ticket was written to cause inconvenience?
“This has my blood boiling. How could this be fair? According to the new law, this is a life.
Bottone said she will be fighting the citation in court.
Her situation hints at how all sorts of existing rules could change—or at least be challenged—when the legal definition of personhood changes.”
“Almost half the United States is ready to outlaw abortion now that the Supreme Court has overruled Roe v. Wade. But many of those states are not willing to give new babies and their families the educational, medical, or financial support they need to lead a healthy life. That could leave tens of thousands of future children unnecessarily disadvantaged and living in poverty.”
…
“Those births will predominately be in the states with the most draconian post-Roe abortion restrictions. And with a few exceptions, those 22 states rank in the bottom half of states in the comprehensive support they provide to children and their families, according to the State-by-State Spending on Kids Dataset compiled by Brown University’s Margot Jackson and her colleagues. The disparities can be enormous: Vermont spends three times as much money on education, health care, and other economic support for children as Utah.”
…
“The children born in these circumstances will start life a few steps behind, all because their political leaders strove to ban abortion without offering support to the children who would be born if their aims were achieved.”
“Perhaps most insidiously, lack of abortion access seriously restricts women’s hopes for their own careers. Building on her team’s research in the Turnaway Study, Foster found that women who were unable to get a desired abortion were significantly less likely to have one-year goals related to employment than those who did, likely because those goals would be much harder to achieve while taking care of a newborn. They were also less likely to have one-year or five-year aspirational goals in general.”
“Black women are more likely to live in areas where it’s harder to access contraception. They get abortions at the highest rates compared to women of other races, due to high rates of unintended pregnancy.
The factors that lead some Black women to seek abortions are present from the day they are born, passed down from mothers who faced similar plights. Those born into poverty are less likely to have access to health care, let alone reproductive or maternal health care; when some Black women are able to seek care, they face medical racism. For centuries, Black women have fought for autonomy over their bodies, against government-sanctioned abuse and abuse from intimate partners. The end of a constitutional right to legal abortion makes the fight harder.
State-level abortion restrictions have already taken effect in at least eight states, and in total, 22 states have laws that impose very strict restrictions on abortions. Those states are home to 39 percent of the total US population, but 45 percent of Black women and girls under age 55.
The consequences will be dire. The end of legal abortion will trap Black women in cycles of poverty. The consequences will also be deadly. Black women have the highest rates of maternal mortality and pregnancy complications, and those risks will only increase if more Black women have to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. Here are the numbers that show how alarming the situation is.”
“Giving birth in the U.S. is already far more dangerous than in other wealthy countries. Ending the protections of Roe v. Wade — the 1973 decision that established the constitutional right to abortion — could make it even more so.
Multiple studies have found that the states that already have the tightest restrictions on abortion also have the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality. And that correlation stubbornly persists even after researchers account for some of the other differences between states, like racial demographics and health care policy. Some researchers think that abortion restrictions are part of the reason why pregnancy and childbirth are so much more dangerous in the U.S. — even for people who never wanted an abortion to begin with.
This data could just be a statistical red herring. But there are ways abortion restrictions could kill people, both directly and indirectly. And scientists say these correlations point toward dangerous disparities in health care access in the U.S. — not just in terms of who can get an abortion, but also in terms of who can get preventative care while pregnant, or even before.”
…
“Carrying an unplanned pregnancy involves shouldering increased risks of depression, preterm birth, lower birth weight and other complications.”
…
“Recently released government data shows that 861 women died from causes related to pregnancy and birth in 2020, up from 754 the year before. In population-level terms, the maternal mortality rate in 2020 was 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births in the U.S., compared with 3.2 deaths per 100,000 live births in Germany in 2019 and 7.9 deaths per 100,000 live births in France in 2015. (The maternal mortality rate calculated by the CDC includes deaths from abortion-related complications, but the organization also calculates that subset separately. In 2019, the death rate from abortion in the United States was minuscule: 0.41 deaths per 100,000 legal abortions between 2013 and 2018.) Infants are also at higher risk of dying in the U.S. than in other wealthy countries. In 2020, the infant mortality rate in the U.S. was 5.4 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with 1.9 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in Finland and 2.7 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in Spain.
Black Americans are nearly three times more likely than their white counterparts to die as a result of maternal complications, and the risk to Black babies is much higher as well. These disparities are so large that the states with the highest maternal mortality rates are also often states with large Black populations, and researchers have concluded that social factors like inequality and structural racism are playing a huge role in why pregnancy complications kill Americans.
But some researchers think that attempts to restrict abortion access are playing a part too.”
…
“The simplest explanation is just that giving birth is statistically more dangerous than having an abortion. If the states with the highest mortality rates are the also the ones banning abortion that means more births — and also more deaths.”
…
“efforts to reduce abortion access have often resulted in the closure of clinics like Planned Parenthood that offer a range of non-abortion-related services. Losing access to preventative health care puts people at a higher risk for all kinds of illnesses that can later cause pregnancy complications. And this effect means the impacts of abortion restriction can overlap and build on the social inequalities that are already harming Black people and babies.”
“Noting that “the Constitution makes no reference to abortion,” Alito argues that “no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely—the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Although “that provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution,” he says, “any such right must be ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ and ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.'” Alito concludes that “the right to an abortion does not fall within this category.”
That analysis falls short in at least two crucial ways.
First, Alito fails to grapple with the argument that the right to terminate a pregnancy can be understood as a subset of the right to bodily integrity. As the legal scholar Sheldon Gelman detailed in a 1994 Minnesota Law Review article, the right to bodily integrity can be traced back to the Magna Carta. That makes it one of the many rights “retained by the people” (in the words of the Ninth Amendment) that were imported into the Constitution from English law. That right, in other words, is “deeply rooted” in American history and tradition.
Second, Alito’s draft opinion distorts the relevant legal history and thus misstates the historical pedigree of abortion rights. “When the United States was founded and for many subsequent decades, Americans relied on the English common law,” explains an amicus brief that the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians filed in Dobbs. “The common law did not regulate abortion in early pregnancy. Indeed, the common law did not even recognize abortion as occurring at that stage. That is because the common law did not legally acknowledge a fetus as existing separately from a pregnant woman until the woman felt fetal movement, called ‘quickening,’ which could occur as late as the 25th week of pregnancy.”
A survey of founding-era legal authorities confirms this view. William Blackstone’s widely read Commentaries on the Laws of England, first published in 1765, noted that life “begins in contemplation of law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother’s womb.” Under the common law, Blackstone explained, legal penalties for abortion applied only “if a woman is quick with child, and by a potion, or otherwise, killeth it in her womb.” That means abortion was legal in the early stages of pregnancy under the common law.
Blackstone’s writings had an important influence on America’s founding generation. In his 1790 Of the Natural Rights of Individuals, for example, James Wilson, a driving force at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and a leading voice for ratification at Pennsylvania’s convention, repeated Blackstone’s gloss. “In the contemplation of law,” Wilson wrote, “life begins when the infant is first able to stir in the womb.”
At the time of the founding, no American state had the lawful power to prohibit abortion before quickening because the states adhered to the common law as described by Blackstone and Wilson. We might call this the original understanding of the states’ regulatory powers. That original understanding contradicts Alito’s assertion that abortion rights—at least during the early stages of pregnancy—lack deep roots in American history.”
“Roe held that the state could “could regulate (but not outlaw) abortions in the interests of the mother’s health” in the second trimester of pregnancy and ban abortions only in the third trimester of pregnancy as a fetus developed more “potentiality of human life.” Its successor case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, affirmed a right to an abortion until a fetus became viable outside the womb.
Unlike slavery and civil rights, abortion is not an issue that lends itself to absolute moral clarity. There are obviously two sets of rights involved, but exactly when legal personhood for the fetus begins has always been contested, as seen in historic laws that banned abortion only after “quickening.”
The cultural genius of Roe is that it created broad parameters that reflect how we think about pregnancy and abortion: At some point during gestation, the fetus becomes a person with a right to life and liberty, but drawing that line will always be a compromise and imprecise. Honest brokers on both sides of the abortion debate will acknowledge that the opposing side has a case.
Survey data show that Roe was remarkably effective at balancing the rights of the fetus and the mother in a way that fits with our societal values. Sixty percent of Americans support abortion in the first three months of pregnancy and only 13 percent in the final three months. Even more telling is data showing that 93 percent of abortions are performed before the 13th week of pregnancy, and just 1 percent are done after 21 weeks.”
…
“individual freedom trumps federalism. Though abortion will never be a clear-cut issue, once we have broad societal agreement on how to delineate between the interests of the mother and the interests of the fetus, women across the country deserve basic protections for their bodily autonomy and privacy.
Keeping abortion legal for at least part of pregnancy doesn’t mean that pro-lifers won’t be able to reduce its incidence. The abortion rate has declined for decades despite the procedure’s availability. So has the unwanted pregnancy rate. These are outcomes worth celebrating, as they reflect women being in more control of their own bodies.
Overthrowing Roe and Casey would threaten that progress and broad consensus by stoking a new culture war in which states rush to ideological extremes that run roughshod over the rights of women or fetuses, depending on the state, some of which are already trying to restrict access to their residents’ ability to receive or even fund abortions performed elsewhere.
Post-Roe America would be one with fewer rights and, likely, more political division. There’s no perfect policy on abortion, but in 1973, the court struck a compromise that most Americans continue to endorse. That victory, I fear, is about to be undone.”