A woman's right to reproductive and bodily autonomy: Introduction

    In an interview with multiple experts, Khiara M. Bridges, a law professor at the University of California-Berkeley, stated the following concerning women’s constitutional guarantee that their rights will be protected:

"Because women were not part of the body politic, the rights that are important to people who can get pregnant are just not contemplated by the Constitution. The drafters of the Constitution could care less about what women's concerns were, what they needed in order to be fully human in society." (Counts, 2022, p. 17)

The conversation that Ms. Bridges and other experts in the field are concerned with stems from a leaked decision to overturn the 1973 court decision of Roe versus Wade, a decision that argued the constitutionality of a women’s right to privacy to terminate or abort her pregnancy in the first and second trimesters (Baker et al., 2020; Roe v. Wade, 1973). This decision sparked the controversy that separated the nation into adopting a pro-choice or pro-life worldview.

    The issue of a woman’s right to bodily autonomy reaches far and wide, from within the scholarly literature to the elected seats of our legislature. Vice President Kamila Harris has been quoted saying, “women will die. In particular, women who don’t have economic resources and can’t travel to places or somehow have access to safe reproductive health care, including abortion. And it is not an extreme statement, it is a fact” (Flanders, 2021, p. 2). A more recent scholarly article posits that in May of 2021, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a “trigger law” (also known as the “Texas Heartbeat Act”) Sommers (2021, p1) 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 that ban or restrict abortions.

References

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/
Counts, J. (2022, May 11). What would overturning Roe mean for birth control? Houston Public Media. https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/npr/2022/05/11/1097666334/what-would-overturning-roe-mean-for-birth-control/
Flanders, N. (2021, December 16). VP Kamala Harris repeats debunked claim that women will die if abortion is not legal. Live Action News. https://www.liveaction.org/news/kamala-harris-debunked-claim-die-abortion-legal/
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