At the forefront of the fight for rights for gender equality lies a women’s movement seeking rights to bodily autonomy, predominantly their right to independent control of reproductive options. Embedded deep within this issue, women continue to fight for the right to make informed choices about their bodies, which some sources claim to be universally valued (allAfrica.com, 2021). While this is not a new topic of debate, it is one that has re-emerged. From the Comstock Act in 1873, which prevented the U.S. Postal Service from mailing contraceptives while also giving the U.S.P.S authority to confiscate any birth control found in the mail, to Margaret Sanger’s conviction that was eventually overturned for opening a birth control clinic in 1916 and 1918, respectively, to the more recently overturned 1973 court decision of Roe versus Wade, which argued the constitutionality of a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy by abortion (Baker et al., 2020; Roe v. Wade, 1973). This court decision allowed women to make the decision to terminate pregnancies in the first and second trimesters, a decision that ultimately birthed the controversy which divided communities into adopting either a “pro-choice” or “pro-life” stance.
This brings us to the more recent changes that have occurred within the past few years as well as those recently decided upon by congress, most of which seek to intercept the reproductive right’s that women still claim. On September 1, 2021, in the state of Texas, where I reside, the state senate enacted Bill S.B. 8, otherwise known as the “Heartbeat Act,” which not only bans abortions after the detection of a fetal heartbeat but also fails to include the ability to terminate a pregnancy produced by either rape or incest (Texas Heartbeat Act, 2021). Laid out in Texas’ Woman's Right to Know Act (Health and Safety Code. §171.001 et seq.), all involved in violating the Texas Heartbeat Act can face both criminal and civil ramifications. Additionally, a more recent scholarly article posits that Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s signing of the Heartbeat Act is what Sommers (2021, p1) describes as a “trigger law” and constitutes one of the “nation’s most far-reaching anti-abortion measures.” A “trigger law” is described by Jozkowski et al. (2019) as the result of when a court decision, such as Roe v. Wade, is reversed at the federal level, thereby triggering individual states to adopt their laws; in this case, laws which ban or restrict abortions. This is precisely what we are seeing across the country.
References
allAfrica.com. (2021). Bodily autonomy - Busting 7 myths that undermine individual rights and freedoms. AllAfrica Global Media. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A658438750/EAIMu=minn4020&sid=ebsco&xid=dd0deab7
Baker, C., Blanchard, K., Corinna, H., Greenfield, M., Leeper, M. A., Perriera, L., Thompson, K., Wallace, R., Weschler, T., Westhoff, C., & Wysocki, S. (2020). A brief history of birth control in the U.S. Our Bodies Ourselves. https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/book-excerpts/health-article/a-brief-history-of-birth-control/
Jozkowski, K. N., Crawford, B. L., Turner, R. C., & Lo, W. J. (2019). Knowledge and sentiments of Roe v. Wade in the wake of Justice Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 17(2), 285–300. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-019-00392-2
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/113/
Sommers, P. M. (2021). Will overturning Roe v. Wade blow more holes in America’s safety net? Atlantic Economic Journal, 49(4), 425–427. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11293-022-09732-x
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