Restriction & Denial of Reproductive Choice: Access to (safe) Abortion

       Reproductive rights, including the right to abortion, have been recognized in international treaties such as CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women), as well as the U.N. Conference on Population in Cairo in 1994, and the 4th World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. Reproductive rights, including the right to abortion, have been recognized by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Ipas, and other human rights groups as fundamental human rights for women. The denial of reproductive health services, including abortion, is a violation of women’s rights to health, life, equality, nondiscrimination, privacy, and the right to determine the number and spacing of one’s children. (Programme of Action, U.N. International Conference on Population and Development, 1994)

From UNT FMLA’s Candle Light Vigil for Women subjected to unsafe abortion:

While abortion is a safe medical procedure, illegal abortion continues to cause tens of thousands of deaths worldwide annually. Before the legalization of abortion in 1973, thousands of women died from complications resulting from botched illegal abortions in the USA. Currently, the Alan Guttmacher Institute estimates that 80,000 women worldwide die annually from unsafe, illegal abortions.

   In country after country around the world, illegal abortion is associated with women dying and being maimed by unsafe abortion, as was the U.S. experience in the years prior to Roe v. Wade.

   Half of all pregnancies to American women are unintended; half of these end in abortion. On the basis of current abortion rates, one in three American women will have had an abortion by age 45. Each year, women have an estimated 20 million clandestine, unsafe abortions. More than three-quarters of all abortions occur in developing countries.

Susan Cohen, director of government affairs at the Guttmacher Institute is quoted as saying: "Evidence from around the world shows that placing restrictions on abortion to make it harder to obtain has much more to do with making it less safe than making it rarer, " "Yet in the United States, abortion opponents take credit for the mounting state and federal restrictions on abortion, rather than working to reduce unintended pregnancy to begin with."

 U.S. women paid a steep price for illegal procedures. In 1962 alone, nearly 1,600 women were admitted to Harlem Hospital Center in New York City for incomplete abortions, which was one abortion-related hospital admission for every 42 deliveries at that hospital that year. In 1968, the University of Southern California Los Angeles County Medical Center, another large public facility serving primarily indigent patients, admitted 701 women with septic abortions, one admission for every 14 deliveries.

 Even in the early 1970s, when abortion was legal in some states, a legal abortion was simply out of reach for many. Minority women suffered the most. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that in 1972 alone, 130,000 women obtained illegal or self-induced procedures, 39 of whom died. Furthermore, from 1972 to 1974, the mortality rate due to illegal abortion for nonwhite women was 12 times that for white women

We cannot let our world, our nation, or our campus, become numb to these crimes that take place in terrifying isolation.  We must bear witness, and urge members of the international community and U.S. leadership to protect and provide the humanitarian assistance and support necessary to address this crisis, and promote reproductive choice as a priority for all. 

"Why do we never want to return to those days before 1973? We saw women who were desperate to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, who would resort to whatever it took to end that unwanted pregnancy, and sometimes they actually put their life on the line. They went to illegal abortionists. They bled to death. They died of infection, or they did self-mutilation procedures in an attempt to end the pregnancy: coat hangers in the uterus, slippery elm in the uterus, potassium permanganate in their vagina—anything they could think of....These women were left as reproductive cripples: Many of them needed hysterectomies, many of them were left with pelvic abscesses, left with infertility, so that at a time in their life when they wanted children, they were unable to have those children. Unwanted pregnancy—unwanted parenthood—clearly is bad for society, and it is bad for the woman who endures it.” (Butler, 2006)

Some women who have died from illegal and unsafe abortions:

http://www.now.org/issues/abortion/120904women-who-died.html 

  Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood, said: "No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother." If women didn’t have control of their fertility (and many don’t), they’d be so busy with childbirth and childrearing, they would have to be economically dependent on men for their own and their children’s survival.  “Fertility control is the key to improving a woman’s mental and physical health and her economic status, and when that care is not affordable, she has to make heart-rending choices. But if a woman can control her fertility, she has a chance to control other parts of her life” (Feldt 90).

Restrictions to access to safe abortion take away some women’s choice in this fundamental matter. Looking at the U.S., the Hyde Amendment seriously restricts this choice of women affected by poverty or domestic abusive relationships in which women don’t have access to money. The Hyde Amendment “had ruled that the states and the federal government could decide how to spend money and that they could refuse to pay for abortions, even for women eligible for government-funded prenatal and delivery care…. It effectively deprived those women of their choice…” (Weddington 197).

People who judge against women in poverty who chose to end their pregnancy take choice out of context; they look at it one-dimensionally rather than the many that exist. So many things could have happened that they don't know about. They’ll say "she shouldn't have spread her legs," "she should have used birth control," etc, etc. Compounding the situation, “cultural norms, together with women’s social and economic dependency, limit a woman’s ability to negotiate safer sex with their partner” (Dobash 116). Birth control fails, women are raped, some aren't educated about birth control, and some cannot afford to give birth due to health or financial affordability. It is a forced choice for many women due to that, locally and globally. Women may in a different context, want to give birth, but due to circumstances, they are pressured not to, because they don't have enough support and they cannot handle it. Check out http://ourword.org/node/645  -- scroll down to the green words starting with "More than a Choice." And read on.

“Prior to 1977, poor women who needed an abortion were able to have their procedure paid for by the Medicaid program. In 1977, Congress passed the Hyde Amendment banning the use of Medicaid funds for abortion. Now the entire cost must be shouldered by women who, by Medicaid’s own standards, are unable to afford medical care.

In 1977 Rosie Jimenez, a 27-year-old single mother and factory worker on welfare, died from an illegal abortion in McAllen, Texas. She resorted to a “back alley” abortion because she couldn’t afford one that was safe and legal. Earlier the same year, the US Congress had passed the Hyde Amendment, forbidding the use of federal Medicaid funds to pay for abortion.

When Rosie died, she had a $700 scholarship check in her purse. She could have used the check to pay for a legal abortion, but doing so would have meant abandoning her opportunity to earn her teaching credentials and end her cycle of poverty. When Rosie died, she orphaned her five year old daughter. Rosie Jimenez is the first woman knows to have died as a result of the Hyde Amendment.

LaShanda

LaShanda, 18, was living in a battered women’s shelter after fleeing an abusive relationship and a beating so severe, she feared her hip was broken. She had 18 potentially fetus-damaging x-rays before discovering her pregnancy.

Nikki

Nikki, 19, was a frequent drug user with two children. She left her husband in an effort to start over, but couldn’t find a job with a salary that could meet her basic needs and pay for child care. While living with her sister and debating her options, she found out she was pregnant.”

(from a pamphlet for The Rosie Jimenez Project)

A huge reason I am so convicted about this issue is because of my involvement with a local abortion fund that does just this—helps women affected by poverty who chose to end their pregnancy but cannot afford it—The Texas Equal Access Fund. “Many women who’ve been raped, abused, or beaten come to the TEA Fund for help. While they may be able to access services to help them with counseling or homelessness, there is no other organization or institution that will assist them in obtaining an abortion, regardless of their circumstances or what caused the pregnancy.” Within the content below are more examples of material experiences of women’s lives that the Texas Equal Access Fund* have helped, to better understand women’s experiences.

Germaine Greer in Sex and Destiny, said: “So far it has been assumed that the only pregnancies which are aborted are accidental ones and the only fetuses destroyed those whose mothers could not bear the thought of their becoming children. In a just world this would be the case, but the world is far from just. Too many women are forced to abort by poverty, by their men folk, by their parents. Poverty has many faces; it may be the poverty of the young, the unmarried, the student, the unemployed, the female or a combination of these.”

Understanding how poverty affects women and makes them much more vulnerable to violence is important to understand this complicated issue and how it can relate to violence. For almost all the same reasons poverty harms and causes vulnerability, this can. If women are affected by poverty, pregnancy, giving birth, and a child could make her situation worse, and only she can decide what she can do. The decision may also be affected by existing violence and abuse women face.

“Interlocking behaviors of control and domination can be physical, sexual, emotional and economic. Thus known men, unlike strangers, can exert economic control so that a woman has to access to money, even her Child Benefit, or she may not be allowed to work outside the home. Food can be restricted so that women may fear starvation and death of themselves or their children, and a woman may be forced to find others to feed her and her children. This can be family, friends or public agencies. Lack of adequate control over money needed for survival of the household is widespread among women who are being abused in other ways. These may include forced sexual intercourse following physical violence… Emotional abuse coexists with these more physical forms which further undermine women’s sense of personal worth and competence. The way that forms of violence and abuse suffuse every aspect of women’s lives makes it difficult for women to emerge from what are best understood as abusive systems of social relations… Men may… attack them when they are pregnant which results in miscarriage. Women may also undergo abortions because the quality of life is so low that women fear for the future of another child. Alternatively, men may force women to have children that the women do not want… [A] long-term effect of violence less often discussed is abortion. Because women are primarily responsible for children they may decide not to proceed with a pregnancy given the way that their other children are being treated and the violence and abuse directed toward themselves. Women consider the future because they assume responsibility for their children.” (Hanner 9-10, 13)

Many women’s lives are at a place where a baby could absolutely not be afforded financially, or psychologically, or would be neglected and abused, or cause others to be neglected and abused. It can complicate a situation where she is already facing violence; “Shelly, mother of an 8 year-old daughter, married to a drug addict who tried to strangle her in front of her daughter, escaped with nothing but a suitcase of clothes and a car with bad brakes, living in a Budget Suites motel where her husband couldn’t find her, down to nothing but food from a soup kitchen and a Wal-Mart card with $8 on it.  She could not imagine trying to survive with her daughter and make a new life for them while having a baby.  She left her husband because she “couldn’t let her daughter grow up believing it was okay for a man to hit her.” 

Intrapersonal violence plays a role here as well. Women can do violent things to themselves to cause miscarriage, hurt themselves because of depression, self-blame, hopelessness, etc., or put themselves in dangerous situations like unsafe illegal abortions. “Adele is a single mother who escaped from an abusive relationship after being beaten and raped.  Unable to support her three children on a minimum wage job, she felt hopeless and suicidal at the thought of having another child.  The TEA Fund gave her a chance to build a better life for herself and her children.” French elaborates on how women with the prospect of a child feel and how society provides no help:

 “Women in despair, unhappy women, behave in self-destructive ways. A society that was really concerned about this behavior would address the causes for hopelessness. Most of the babies harmed by self-destructive maternal actions are part of the underclass that society condemns to death every time it chooses to spend money on weapons rather than social programs. We turn our backs on these babies when we move our families to the suburbs, snatch our children out of public schools, refuse to hire people of color, or simply see them as inferior beings. We as a society do not care if these babies die—indeed, there are people who wish the poor and people of color would not procreate—yet we punish mothers whose actions acknowledge our indifference. Remember that in each minute that passes, the governments of the world spend $1.3 million of wealth produced by the public (between two-thirds and three-quarters of it by women) on military expenses. That government does not try to help but only to punish poor mothers, that it spends our money on weapons that kill children, not on nourishing them, is another sign of its war against women” (French 147).

It is no one’s place to force a woman who cannot or does not want to and has chosen not to give birth to do so. Yet that is what happens when access is restricted. This is mostly systematic and institutional, with governmental policy restrictions, and religious beliefs maintaining some peoples’ motivation for movements towards restrictions that effectively control women and deny them reproductive choice.

Physical pain and injury to women can happen in childbirth. This is not to say that childbirth is necessarily violence against women, but it is to say that forced childbirth forces women into physical pain an injury, which conforms to definitions of popular narrow definitions of violence. If women have health risks threatening, giving birth could seriously hurt or kill her. Sometimes, a woman’s body cannot handle it. “Ebony, an eleven year-old girl who still plays with dolls won’t tell anyone how she became pregnant.  Her mother suspects incest, and the state is investigating.  In the meantime the family had no money to pay for an abortion.  The TEA Fund provided funds to prevent this child from having a child.”

At times, ending pregnancy can be extremely important for reasons not even thought of in popular discourse or common consciousness. For instance, “Claire, a single mother who lost her home in New Orleans to Hurricane Katrina and was forced to evacuate while her 2 year-old son remained in a Louisiana hospital awaiting a kidney transplant.  Claire was his organ donor, but she was unable to donate while pregnant.  The TEA Fund helped pay for her abortion, and ten days later Claire donated a kidney to save her son.”

 Also, in some cases it can be useless and traumatic to give birth because of defects, such as going through with a birth where the fetus has no brain or is dead. The woman may wish to have a living child, and going through a full pregnancy and birthing process in cases like those could be extremely psychologically and physically painful.

Denying women to their fundamental right to reproductive choice can cause vulnerability for women, especially when poverty, domestic violence, and other factors are considered. Women should have reproductive choice in all cases, not just the ones where she is affected this immensely. However, in many cases it can and does affect women in this way, and that should not be ignored. There is not much information on the relation of abortion to domestic violence available. It should be expanded on to be better understood, and to add to public discourse about access to abortion.

For more stories and information on the TEA Fund can be found here:

http://www.teafund.org/stories.html

*Quotes by the Texas Equal Access Fund President, Gretchen Dyer.