The New York Times
September 24, 2011
Where Abortion Rights Are Disappearing
By DOROTHY SAMUELS
Thirty-eight years after Roe v. Wade recognized a woman’s right to make her own childbearing decisions and legalized abortion nationwide, a newly intensified drive by anti-abortion forces who refuse to accept the law of the land has seriously imperiled women’s ability to exercise that right. Opponents of abortion rights know they cannot achieve their ultimate goal of an outright ban, at least in the near future. So they are concentrating on enacting laws and regulations narrowing the legal right and making abortion more difficult to obtain.
The most visible battleground is Congress, where the House Republican majority seems to have time for a big-government attack on women’s reproductive health and freedom but not to pass a job-creating bill.
However, as in the past, most of the fights are taking place in state capitals. The result has been a huge number of new abortion restrictions, traceable in part to the 2010 mid-term elections, which increased the number of anti-abortion governors and state legislatures controlled by abortion opponents, who keep concocting new schemes to make terminating a pregnancy a right on paper only. The spate of new laws comes on top of many state and federal abortion curbs already in place.
The map illustrates the barriers, state by state, facing women needing access to a constitutionally protected medical procedure. States shown in the darkest shade have enacted five of the most harmful restrictions: mandatory waiting periods; demeaning “counseling” sessions lacking a real medical justification; parental consent or notification laws that pose a particular hardship for teenagers from troubled homes, including incest victims; needlessly onerous clinic “safety” rules governing such things as the width of hallways and the amount of storage space for janitorial supplies; and prohibitions on abortion coverage in insurance policies. States in lighter shades have fewer of these restrictions. Twenty-seven states have enacted three or more of these laws, while only 12 states, shown in white, have none.
The graphic traces the total number of a broad range of major abortion restrictions enacted by the states, including the five covered in the map and others, like mandatory ultrasounds. Sixty-one such laws were enacted during just the first eight months of this year — nearly triple the number in all of 2010, and more than double the previous record of 28 set in 1997. Although some of this year’s statutes have already been preliminarily enjoined by courts as unconstitutional, others will be left to stand as constraints on women’s reproductive freedom.
If anything, the chart understates the limits on access to abortion. It fails to capture other negative developments, like the big decline in the number of abortion providers. In 1982, there were 2,908 providers nationwide. As of 2008, there were only 1,793. In 97 percent of the counties that are outside metropolitan areas there are no abortion providers at all.
One powerful strategy of the anti-abortion forces has been to portray abortion as outside the mainstream and cast women who have abortions as immoral outliers. In reality, abortion is one of the safest and most common of medical procedures, one that about one-third of American women undergo during their lifetime.
One clear lesson of this year’s skyrocketing number of new state laws is that those who care about keeping the procedure safe, legal and accessible need to raise their voices as loudly and effectively as those on the other side. If they don’t do so, and quickly, the number of harmful restrictions will continue to balloon, at a rising cost to women’s lives, health and equality.
Veronica Smink
BBC Mundo, Argentina
