A few weeks ago, over 100,000 Polish people took to the streets in the capital city of Warsaw, protesting the new abortion law which states that abortions in instances where a foetus is diagnosed with a serious and irreversible birth defect were unconstitutional. Such procedures account for almost all of the abortion procedures in the country.
Last summer, the state of Alabama in the United States passed The Human Protection Act that essentially banned almost all abortions, even in the case of sexual assault. Thousands took to the streets in various parts of the United States protesting the law, leading to its delayed implementation.
Abortion laws have been the centre of many pro-life movements in the West and the feminist movement years before the monumental decision of US Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. The truth about these movements fighting so hard for abortion laws seems simple in one liners like: ‘My body, My choice’ or, ‘No uterus, No opinion’. But the reality goes deeper into the way women have been treated in the past and the degree of representation they hold now.
Church + Chastity vs Feminists
Think Ireland’s abortion laws.
In 1972, the SCOTUS made birth control legal for all citizens irrespective of their marital status. The Catholic Church strongly opposed contraception, but millions of American women still embraced the pill’s convenience of being able to gain pleasure without the fear of getting pregnant.
Even in the case of Poland’s abortion laws, the Polish Catholic Church holds that the baby - even mentally or physically damaged should be delivered, baptised and then buried. This is one of the biggest challenges in the West - opposition from the Church and trying to convince Christian evangelical lawmakers to allow women the right over their body.
This is a pattern women in all regions of the world are too familiar with: the groundbreaking choice of picking between faith and their reproductive health. Women have always been at the forefront of the face of a society’s cultural roots and the show of chastity. Take note of celebrations of chastity and ‘purity’ in the social construct of ‘virginity’, for a man to rave about when taking it away from a woman. (Think: first episode of Made in Heaven.)
The catholic church has long opposed contraception, denying women the freedom to have pleasure in sex. Religious institutions have long been known to deny women the ability to bar them from having multiple partners and/or relationships, finding yet another way to tie women down to the idea of dignity in the state of their genitals. Surely, the Church has started to grow less conservative over the years, but the fact stands that many evangelical lawmakers do not still agree to provide women the right to make their sexual and reproductive health a priority.
Representation
1920 was the year when women were finally given the right to vote in the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, now allowing them to participate in the decisions that shaped their lives: the economic policies, construction of roads around them, their representatives and everything under the sun. However, it would take years to see the first women in power. This gulf between men and women gaining power and making decisions is what lies at the heart of the problem.
This subsequently causes more women being represented by men, than by women. The underlying idea of asking for equal representation, or rather fair representation is given by Bettina Aptheker, a professor for Feminist Studies at UCSC in what she calls is the evolving definition of Feminism:
“Women shall have at least as much to say as men about everything in the arrangement of human affairs, including - especially- the meaning, purpose and activities of their own lives.”
Access to healthcare
Besides all the above mentioned reasons, the point still stands - at the end of the day, abortion is about the reproductive and physical health.
The beginning of the 1970s saw another turn in the Second wave of the Feminist movement. Educating women about their bodies became the focus of the movement, breaking the silence of mainstream media on women’s reproductive health. It led to the publishing of the trade edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1973 with the Boston Women’s Health Collective. The widely circulated paperback discussed topics such as reproduction, abortion, menopause and, sexuality and sexual orientations.
As long as women collectively and properly do not have a say in what goes on with their own bodies, without any strings attached to chastity or dignity in the condition of how their uterus behaves - abortion will continue to remain at the centre of the fight for women’s rights in the West.
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