A U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Friday that held there is no constitutional right to an abortion generated a tsunami of emotion across the United States. Religious conservatives celebrated the attainment of a long-held goal while abortion-rights advocates warned that millions of American women will now face daunting obstacles to receiving what many consider a basic health care service.
Demonstrators outside the Supreme Court cheered, booed, and wept as Americans across the country began to prepare for a future in which a woman’s right to abort a pregnancy — protected for nearly 50 years by the court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade — will be eliminated or sharply curtailed in more than half of the 50 states.
In more than a dozen states, restrictions on abortion were expected to take effect almost immediately due either to “trigger laws” meant to come into effect with the overturning of Roe, or laws already on the books that were not enforced because of the protections Roe afforded.
In all, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a women’s health research organization, eventually 26 states are “certain or likely to ban abortion to the fullest extent possible.”
In some states this will include measures banning abortion with no exception for rape or incest, bringing criminal prosecutions against medical professionals who perform abortions, and bringing criminal prosecutions against women who have abortions.
“It's truly an atrocity,” said Heather Shumaker, director of state abortion access at the National Women's Law Center. “We are yet to see the chaos that's going to be unleashed in this country from this decision.”
“Every day women are seeking abortion care,” she told VOA. “They need help from their families and their friends and their trusted partners and providers to get that care. And the court has essentially put all of that into jeopardy with this decision. Clinics are going to be closing. Those who help people get abortions could be threatened with lawsuits, people are going to be increasingly criminalized and policed. … I don't think that the country truly knows what to expect yet.”
By contrast Steven Aden, general counsel for Americans United for Life, told VOA that he experienced “euphoria” when the decision was announced, and called on abortion rights supporters to accept the ruling.
“The pro-life movement extends its hand across the aisle, to those on the pro-abortion side, and we call on them to recognize what abortion really is and does to women and to life in the womb so that we can forge a new America, one that's not divided over the right to kill children in the womb,” he said.
By making the federal government silent on the question of abortion and throwing the issue to the states, the ruling guarantees a patchwork of abortion laws across the country. The procedure is expected to remain broadly available in the Northeast, on the Pacific Coast, and in some states in the interior of the country, including Illinois, Colorado and New Mexico.
In areas of the Deep South and Midwest, however, there will be little or no access to abortion services. Women seeking care could face journeys of hundreds of miles — which virtually guarantees that many will carry unwanted pregnancies to term. This will be particularly true for women without significant financial resources and support networks, a population in which minority groups are disproportionately represented, according to the U.S. Census.
There will also be variations among states in the way abortion laws are enforced. In some cases, it will be the job of law enforcement agencies to bring charges against people found to be in violation of the law.
In other states, including Texas and Oklahoma, enforcement is delegated to private citizens. Those states have given individual citizens the right to sue people involved in an abortion procedure that is against the law. This tactic was originally devised when Roe remained in force, because it made it difficult or impossible to challenge the legislation in federal court.
Professor Tracey A. Weitz, an American University sociologist, told VOA that research has clearly established that women who want an abortion but are unable to get one experience a wide range of negative outcomes in the next five years.
“Those women were more likely to have poor economic consequences, more bankruptcies, more evictions, more financial problems,” she said. “The children that they had, and the children they already had, are more likely to suffer economic and social consequences. People were more likely to stay in relationships with violent partners, and they were more likely to suffer health consequences and, in some cases, death.”