How Abortion Access Can Save Women From Violence

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Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D
@RVAwonk
I wrote about why we have to start talking about abortion bans as a form of violence against women, & stop letting anti-abortion advocates dance around the fact that what they’re pushing for is state-sanctioned reproduction coercion — also known as abuse.

How Abortion Access Can Save Women From Violence
In America, pregnancy is a uniquely violent and sometimes deadly time. Abortion can be a lifeline.
newrepublic.com
9:35 AM · Dec 15, 2021

https://newrepublic.com/article/164711/abortion-bans-violence-against-women

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There was a particularly revealing exchange at the Supreme Court last week, during arguments over Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, in a case with grave implications for abortion rights nationwide. Justice Amy Coney Barrett brought up safe haven laws—which allow babies to be surrendered for adoption shortly after birth without criminal penalties—and suggested that abortion is no longer necessary since women can just give up their babies for adoption. If abortion rights advocates are concerned about the burdens of forced motherhood, Barrett asked, “Why don’t the safe haven laws take care of that problem?”

Barrett’s comments reflect complete disregard for the ordeal of pregnancy itself and the impact of making people endure an unwanted pregnancy. It’s heinous enough to suggest that safe haven laws somehow negate the horror of forced pregnancy by offering an illusion of choice at the end, but there’s an even more tragic fact behind Barrett’s callous false compromise: A nontrivial number of people will never even make it to the end of pregnancy. In America, pregnancy is a uniquely dangerous, and often violent, time. Abortion can be a lifeline, but Barrett and other anti-abortion advocates appear poised to cut it off.

This isn’t the first time that anti-abortion activists have pushed adoption via safe haven laws as a replacement for abortion. Groups like Family Council have promoted nearly identical talking points, and lawyers for the state of Texas wrote in recent filings in support of its six-week abortion ban, “Abortion is permanent. Pregnancy lasts months.”

What Barrett and her fellow anti-abortion advocates are promoting is not just an assault on abortion rights but an actual assault on pregnant people—a form of state-sanctioned violence that would bring with it life-altering, and for some, life-ending consequences.

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