Roe Anniversary Roundup

Forty years ago today, on 22 January 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in a 7-2 decision, on a case known as Roe v Wade, declaring that the U.S. Constitution protects a woman’s right to decide whether or not to continue a pregnancy to term. The original case that the court agreed to hear was a challenge to a 19^th Century Texas law that prohibited abortion except where necessary to save a woman’s life.

Given the efforts since Roe to curtail abortion access in the U.S., and the publicity it gets, some are surprised to learn that New Zealand’s abortion law is actually much more regressive than U.S. federal law on abortion. Here, abortion remains criminalised (that is, governed by the Crimes Act); in the U.S., it generally is not.

What throws people off is that although our law is worse, the practice here is often much more liberal – at least, more liberal than it is in conservative U.S. states. Which just goes to show that it’s often just as much how a law is implemented as it is what that law actually says that makes the difference. (It also shows that no matter what the law on the books, abortion access is always vulnerable to rollback.)

There have already been lots of articles written to mark the anniversary of Roe, and there will surely be more. But today’s the day, so what follows is a (limited) round-up that tries to traverse a few of the main issues. Please feel free to add links to other good pieces in comments. Oh, and the usual rule applies: The place to debate the morality of abortion is here, not here.

Perhaps the biggest splash in anniversary reporting was made just over a week ago in a Time magazine cover story headlined like this: “Forty Years Ago Abortion-Rights Activists Won an Epic Victory With Roe V. Wade: They’ve Been Losing Ever Since”  One of the controversies it sparked was its coverage of “a rebellion” in the pro-choice movement between younger feminists and what the author, Kate Pickert, called “legacy feminist organisations” – a rebellion, she wrote, that “threatens to tear it in two”.

Several writers at the reproductive health site RH Reality Check responded to Pickert, including Steph Herold with  Young People Are Not Fragmenting the Pro-Choice Movement, Renee Chellan’s The End of Right to Lies, and a piece by Charlotte Taft, who works in abortion care and was interviewed by Pickert, titled “What Choice? *Our* Choice”.