This presidential election, as much anxiety as it has caused, could be considered one of the most engaged political debates in our nation’s history. That’s as it should be: from the founders to the suffragettes to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Shirley Chisholm, our country has a history of protecting the democratic process and engaging in healthy debate about it.
On the internet you see the words “I’m old enough to remember when..” and I wonder how many members of today’s generation have learned the history of RBG, but for my part, I was born in 1969. So, though I was still a little kid, and abortion was illegal from the 1880s through 1973, I’m just barely the age to recount a time in our country when women died trying to get legal abortions.
In deciding Roe v. Wade, the Court ruled that a Texas statute forbidding abortion except when necessary to save the life of the mother was unconstitutional. The Court arrived at its decision by concluding that the issue of abortion and abortion rights falls under the right of privacy in the United States (e.g. federal constitutionally-protected right), in the sense of the right of a person not to be encroached by the state.
Prior to 1973, women died seeking legal abortions. Estimates of the number of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year. Consider the death toll: In 1930, abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2700 women— nearly one-fifth (18 percent) of maternal deaths recorded in that year. The death toll had declined to just under 1700 by 1940, and to just over 300 by 1950 (most likely because of the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, which permitted more effective treatment of the infections that frequently developed after illegal abortion). By 1965, the number of deaths had fallen to just under 200, but illegal abortion still accounted for 17 percent of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth that year. And these are just numbers that were officially reported; the actual numbers were likely much higher.
Today, since the overturning of Roe V. Wade in 2022 due to Trump’s Supreme Court choices (and something he continually brags about) women are dying again: not from abortions, but mothers during miscarriage, from lack of medical care due to villainization of reproductive rights. Health care professionals in states with abortion bans are afraid to do their jobs, which is saving lives. Pro-life activists simply can’t only regard the life of a fetus without regarding the life of a mother, and in the current election many Republican women are choosing “country over state” in order to return reproductive rights and bodily autonomy to women, where they belong, instead of the government, where they don’t.
Writing in dissent in Gonzales v. Carhart, a case in which the court upheld a federal restriction on abortion, Justice Ginsburg stated: “[L]egal challenges to undue restrictions on abortion procedures do not seek to vindicate some generalized notion of privacy; rather, they center on a woman’s autonomy to determine her life’s course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature.”
It was a point she’d made since her 1993 Senate confirmation hearings. In that hearing, Justice Ginsburg emphasized: “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity… When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”
In this election cycle there are many issues: red herrings of misinformation about the economy, immigration, grocery prices. But this one issue stands to be the one that might make the difference in the election: women vote. At higher rates than men.
Seeing Michele Obama speak in Michigan recently was powerful as she described women affected by the overturning of Roe V. Wade as “collateral damage” and pleaded for voters to “take our lives seriously.”
She stands by Kamala Harris, whose views on reproductive rights are succinct: "I've been very clear, I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe, and get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do."
In addition to the ads narrated by Julia Roberts about women voting for Harris when their partners think they’re voting otherwise, women’s groups describe a potentially even more powerful “whisper campaign” wherein women speak within their own groups and communities to affect change.
When I was born, abortion was illegal and women died. Then for about a half century, reasonable minds (generally) prevailed on behalf of the health care of women. Now, women are dying again. For Halloween yesterday, I had AI generate a costume: Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a zombie—she’s back, she’s pissed, and she’s watching on Tuesday.