The Roe v. Wade decision was handed down 51 years ago today. It secured for US women the right to an abortion and was based on the constitutional right to privacy, in this case privacy regarding personal healthcare decisions.
The Constitution hasn’t changed. The right to privacy still exists. What changed was the Supreme Court — now heavily conservative thanks to three appointments by Donald Trump. And that court, in its June 24, 2022, Dobbs decision, ignored 50 years of precedent and overturned Roe v. Wade.
Within a year of the Dobbs decision, some 25 million American women — one in three — saw their abortion rights restricted or eliminated entirely. Twenty-one states have enacted some form of abortion restriction.
A majority of Americans believe abortion should remain legal. A majority of Americans identify as pro-choice. The question now is whether the majority will vote accordingly in November.
Oremus ..
Yes, because it is literally a matter of life and death.
Who knows what else might happen if Trump wins another term? Government-mandated changes to history and civics books? Not to mention impetuous use of tactical nukes? There are so many possibilities.
I’m not yet “terrified” like Michelle Obama, but only because I can’t live in that state for 10½ months. I’m not sure what scares me more — Trump as president or the 74 million people who voted for him in 2016.
Definitely the people who voted for him. It’s incomprehensible.
It is. Totally incomprehensible. Can that many Americans really be that blind, that ignorant, that stupid? Or, even more scary, do that many really want a malignant narcissist in the White House? Are that many Americans really that racist, that duplicitous, that violent, that misogynistic? That is indeed terrifying to contemplate.
I’m hoping against hope that the sane people who are in a position to do it are ensuring everything factual is digitalised and hidden away somewhere underground. Because if he’s elected again there’s going to be exactly what you say in a seemingly unending period of horribleness .. but it will end one day, and the true facts could be brought back to the light.
Well we’d better get moving and damn fast because the GOP is doing its best to expunge or change a good portion of our history. I can’t even imagine the state we’ll be in if Trump is reelected.
…all abortions were illegal in Canada until 1969. The new law allowed for abortions only after a three-doctor panel agreed the mother’s life was in danger. In all other cases abortion remained illegal. In 1988, the Supreme Court decided that law was against the 1982 Charter of Rights & Freedoms, based on a woman’s right to security of the person: “Forcing a woman, by threat of criminal sanction, to carry a fetus to term unless she meets certain criteria unrelated to her own priorities and aspirations… the [current] law asserts that the woman’s capacity to reproduce is to be subject, not to her own control, but to that of the state.”
So the Supreme Court told Parliament to come up with a new law, which they did a year later. The 1989 law would have given a doctor a two-year sentence for approving an abortion in the case of a mother not being at risk. The law died in the Senate. In 2006 there was an attempt to create a new law banning abortions after the 20th week, but that law never made it past the planning stage.
So, Canada hasn’t had a law regulating abortions since 1988. The provinces, which have Constitutional jurisdiction over health care, leave it up to the individual doctors and hospitals to decide on who and when abortions can happen. There are a couple of provinces where there’s only one or two hospitals willing to perform an abortion.
Anytime abortion becomes a voting issue, roughly 60% of Canadians want the law (or lack of one) to remain, 20% want some restrictions, and 20% want the law to revert to the 1969 version. So, very recently, the ‘Conservative Party of Canada’ even removed any mention of being ‘anti-abortion / pro-life’ from their platform. So the only remaining voting choices for those seeking to change the law are a couple of very fringe parties.
I honestly never gave any thought to what the laws might be in Canada. Guilty of naval gazing, I guess because my father was an ob-gyn. Sounds like, in general, Canadians feel the same way most Americans feel. We just don’t want the government dictating our personal healthcare decisions. What happens between me and my doctor is none of the government’s business.
I considered writing a post about this and am so glad to see that you did. I continued to be shocked by what has happened and continues to happen in regard to health care access. This decision makes women second class citizens when it comes to securing essential care. I grew up in a time when abortion was illegal, and it was awful. As my mother once said, we have to allow abortion because too many women are dying. Today there was a news story about a Texas man who gave his wife (without her knowledge or consent) abortion-inducing medication. He got 180 days. To put that into perspective, you can get 5 years for driving a pregnant woman to a state where abortion is legal. This is about controlling women, isn’t it. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-attorney-poisoned-pregnant-wife-abortion-medication-sentenced-18-rcna138065
I’ve no words left for this topic. Only anger and frustration. How can so many fellow Americans still be so misogynistic, so sexist, so close-minded, so … ignorant! At the very least, can’t they just live and let live? Just stay out of other people’s business?