Overturning Roe v. Wade will be catastrophic for millions of women across the U.S. If Roe was overturned today, the Guttmacher Institute estimates that 26 states are certain or likely to ban abortion and that the people living in those states would have to travel significantly farther to get an abortion. Last year alone, over 100 abortion bills were introduced by conservative Republican legislatures across the country. For decades, after the passage of Roe v. Wade, conservatives; who label themselves as pro-life have been chipping away at the law that guarantees women the right to an abortion. The current reality is that women have been experiencing barriers to getting abortive care and in a post-Roe world, it will only get harder.
But let’s take a step back to get a glimpse of what the reproductive health landscape was before the passage of Roe v. Wade and then I will discuss some of what to expect in a post-Roe world. Restrictions, eugenics, and forced sterilization have all been a part of the fibre of this country’s legacy of controlling women’s bodies. Before the passage of the once “settled” law, the legitimacy of motherhood was determined by the authorities. Ricky Solinger, co-author of the book “Reproductive Justice; An Introduction” alongside firebrand researcher and activist Loretta J. Ross asks the following critical questions
- Who gets to be a “legitimate” mother in the United States?
- Who is denied maternal legitimacy?
- What do race and class have to do with “legitimate” and “illegitimate” maternity?
- How does the maternal “legitimacy” of some persons depend on and guarantee the illegitimacy of others?
I want you to answer these questions for yourself but before you do so, continue reading. Any response to the questions above can be answered by just taking a step back into history. And this history is not too long ago, to be honest. In 1927, the U.S. The Supreme Court unanimously voted (8-1) in the Buck v. Bell case that forced sterilization was legal for persons the Commonwealth considered “socially inadequate.”
