By Warren M. Hern
One of the great legal landmarks in American history, and one of the most important landmarks in the history of women, is one year short of its 50th anniversary. The Supreme Court handed down its Roe v. Wade decision on Jan. 22, 1973, and it is very doubtful that it will reach that 50th anniversary. With its anticipated abolition by the Court goes freedom and health for many American women.
The Supreme Court is now a partisan tool of the Republican Party and its partner in gaining overwhelming, unassailable political power. We are headed for permanent minority rule by a white supremacist, misogynistic, theocratic minority that opposes basic personal freedom, secular society, freedom of the press, scientific knowledge, social justice, civil rights, voting rights, democracy itself, and thought.
The Roe v. Wade decision was not just a historic event that liberated American women and allowed them to make decisions about their own lives and health. It must be seen as one of the most significant events in human evolutionary experience.
For hundreds of thousands of years, women have been at the mercy of their own biology as they faced the risk of death and catastrophic injury with each pregnancy. Pregnancy is not a benign condition. Women die from pregnancy. That’s why doctors and those who preceded them have worked for thousands of years to help women who are pregnant and giving birth. François Mauriceau, the great 17th century French physician, called pregnancy “le malade de neuf mois” – “the disease of nine months.” Mauriceau was the author of the first textbook of obstetrics published in 1668. It is an extraordinary work in both the literary and medical sense. Childbirth has been a chamber of horrors for many women. Mauriceau led the way to modern obstetrics.
Soranus, a Greek physician in the 2nd century, had instruments for ending a pregnancy.
In the 19th century, Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis discovered how to keep women from dying horrible deaths from infections following childbirth.
Anthropologist George Devereux showed that abortion was practiced by hundreds of tribal societies throughout the world.
Physicians Rolando Armijo and Tegualda Monreal showed that thousands of women were suffering and dying from illegal, unsafe abortion in Santiago, Chile in the 1960’s.
Margaret Sanger was moved to help women control their fertility with contraceptives because she watched so many women die horribly from illegal self-induced abortions.
Twentieth century American physicians such as Alan Guttmacher, Louise Tyrer and many others worked to make abortion legal in the United States.
Attorney Harriet Pilpel successfully argued in the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut case that married women, at least, should have access to effective contraception. This decision was a critical antecedent to Roe v. Wade.
Finally, in 1973, Sarah Weddington persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to legalize abortion in the United States.
For the first time in all human history, women were legally enabled to end pregnancies safely with the help of their own physicians.
There is no way to overstate the importance of that successful effort by Sarah Weddington and her colleagues for the lives of hundreds of millions of people since that time. Over 60 million abortions have been performed for American women and women from other countries in the U.S. since 1973. Each one of those abortions has affected the lives of many other people starting with those who loved the woman having a safe abortion.
Legal abortion has reduced deaths of women from unsafe abortion to almost zero and has had important positive effects on other aspects of maternal and child health. This is well documented by thousands of research reports.
It has been one of the greatest public health successes in the history of medicine.
Using the abortion issue and the Christian anti-abortion fanatics since 1974 to get power, the Republican Party is determined to put women back in their place – pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen, making cookies and having babies. None of this competing with men for jobs, money and power. Being against abortion wins elections for Republicans.
Donald Trump, gaining the Republican nomination by displaying his racism, changing his position from pro-choice to anti-abortion and saying that women should be punished for having abortions, won the support of 82% of the White Christian Evangelicals in the 2016 election. He and Mitch McConnell then installed three new anti-abortion justices on the Supreme Court as payback. It was a straightforward, shamelessly corrupt deal that endangers women’s lives.
The newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, whose confirmation was pushed through in a few weeks because of her publicly stated opposition to abortion and Trump’s hope that she would hand him the election that he expected to lose, stood on a platform in Kentucky with Mitch McConnell and said, “I am not a political hack.”
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
Warren M. Hern, a physician, is Director of the Boulder Abortion Clinic
