Breaking the silence
Zoe Marks
The Supreme Court’s decision last week to let state legislatures control people’s access to abortion care is the latest chapter in a decades-long conversation that most Americans have been reluctant to have.
The majority opinion in Dobbs reverses precedent on the basis of the Constitution. As a historical reference point, it’s useful to remember there is no record of women being discussed at the Constitutional Convention, they couldn’t own property or vote, and their fathers or husbands exercised political, legal, and physical “tyranny” over them (to use Abigail Adams’s framing). Yet, abortion was legal throughout the colonies and widely practiced throughout the Americas. For millions of enslaved women, who were held as property and legally denied bodily autonomy and personhood, sharing knowledge of birth control and abortifacients was a way to claim their sovereignty and resist white capitalist violence. (Poignantly, women on plantations chewed the roots of cotton—the single most influential cash crop in the South—to prevent and end unwanted pregnancy.)
Now, states in the South and Midwest have the fastest growing rate of abortion restrictions (Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood). Deep histories of legal and material inequalities shape people’s experiences of health and wellbeing—and laws that restrict or promote them. For people who are heterosexually intimate, access to contraception has taken on new urgency—over 19 million women live in contraceptive deserts and availability is lowest in many of the same states with newly legal abortion bans. These states, incidentally, also have some of the weakest sexual health and sexuality education in schools. More broadly, the implications of states controlling people’s access to reproductive healthcare will offer another unwelcome lesson in the cruelty of intersectional oppression: poor, rural, and undocumented patients, disproportionately women of color, are most likely to lose access to abortion and least likely to have access to contraception, quality reproductive and maternal healthcare, paid medical or parental leave, and childcare. Moreover, these groups are most likely to be surveilled, criminalized, and punished under rapidly proliferating anti-abortion laws and will have fewer legal resources to protect themselves and their loved ones.
Such impacts will be felt most powerfully at the embodied level, then in intimate relationships, households, and families; workplaces and spiritual communities will reverberate with the effects of forced parenthood, and campaigns and public debate will (potentially) renew focus on which rights, safety nets, and protections should be bolstered and how. Viewing U.S. politics and moral debates through a global lens can help us more clearly see the nature of this divided republic. The United States is one of only three countries—joining Nicaragua and Poland—to curtail abortion rights since 2000, while 31 have expanded them. American polarization is visible on a global stage, where the United States is now simultaneously one of the most abortion-restrictive and permissive countries in the world, joining just 24 countries where abortion is outlawed in all circumstances and 72 countries where it is available on request.
Breaking the silence in our reluctant abortion and reproductive justice conversations will determine what comes next at the most intimate and highest public levels of our personal and political lives.
Zoe Marks is a lecturer in public policy at The Harvard Kennedy School for Public Policy .