Abortion, Hypocrisy, and a Woman's Right to Choose

Abortion should always be left to a woman and her doctor. Whatever the reasons, it’s her call.

Abortion rights, already fragile in much of the country, now seem poised to disappear in many states, with devastating consequences. The Supreme Court is expected to overturn Roe v. Wade — perhaps entirely, perhaps leaving a shell behind — in ways that may leave a majority of American women unable to get an abortion in their home states.

Some 58 percent of American women of reproductive age live in the 29 states hostile to abortion rights, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The practical consequence is that affluent women in those states will travel to more liberal states to get abortions, but many low-income and marginalized women will be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.

So this is a watershed moment in the history of women’s rights in America. A common procedure — almost one-quarter of American women have an abortion at some point in their lives — will likely become illegal in the states where a majority of women live.

I’ve always argued for abortion rights, so I find this a maddening turn — and obviously it is far more so for many women, whose health and wellbeing are at stake. On so many other issues, such as LGBTQ rights, there has been enormous progress, yet on this issue we’re poised to make a great leap backward.

It also comes at a time when women understandably feel stymied in many areas. A dozen years ago, my wife, Sheryl WuDunn, and I wrote a book about women’s rights around the world, “Half the Sky,” and it was a time when there seemed a good deal of progress in the United States. Yet we’ve just had a man in the White House who boasted of sexual assaults, #MeToo has underscored the prevalence of harassment and abuse across the work force, wage gaps persist, women have run into a glass ceiling in both politics and CEO jobs, America remains almost alone in the industrialized world without paid family leave and decent child care options, and poverty disproportionately has a female face. The setback on abortion rights is one more crushing disappointment in our hope for a more just world.

Photo Credit: U.S. National Archives

My state of Oregon is not one where abortion rights are at risk if the Supreme Court dismantles Roe. On the contrary, Oregon follows its progressive instincts and has one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country, with no restrictions. Moreover, Oregon’s version of Medicaid does pay for abortions. We’re a model in that respect.

In 2018, anti-abortion activists put a measure on the ballot in Oregon to prohibit the use of public funds for abortions. The initiative was rejected by 64 percent to 36 percent.

So what can states like Oregon do to respond to a health crisis in which tens of millions of women may lose access to abortions?

One step might be to increase abortion access in Eastern Oregon towns like Ontario, serving those communities — but also meaning that women in Idaho or Utah could see doctors on the Oregon side of the border. There are issues of resources and security to evaluate, but it’s worth considering.

In addition, I’ve been exploring whether there are options for Oregon health care providers to offer telemedicine support for women in other states who need abortions, and in particular to provide the abortion pill to women in those other states. Doctors and nurses do sometimes prescribe medicines for patients across state lines, although usually those are pre-existing patients. Experts tell me there are potential pitfalls with setting up a telemedicine system to provide abortion pills to new patients in other states, but the hurdles may be manageable. In any case, it seems an issue worth exploring further, and I believe we could get foundation funding to support the legal research and perhaps the services themselves.

In a broader sense, I don’t think abortion opponents understand how much the abortion pill may undermine bans in a post-Roe world. The abortion pill is actually two prescription medications (mifepristone and misoprostol), and Planned Parenthood says that they can be successfully used to trigger an abortion up to about 98 percent of the time, in the first 11 weeks of pregnancy. I’ve reported on the pills for many years, and there’s overwhelming evidence of their safety.

 “This revolutionizes abortion in places that try to ban it,” one advocate of abortion rights told me. My take is that if abortion pills can improve access for marginalized women in states that are losing rights, then we should try to support that process.

Even if there are policy steps that can mitigate this attack on women’s rights, there’s still damage to our political culture. It’s beyond upsetting to see an important right reduced to yet another battle in a political war. So let me also vent for a moment about the effort to crack down on abortion rights.

I don’t believe abortion rights should depend on people’s reasons. It’s their decision. But since abortion opponents invariably cite eighth-month abortions as an argument for limiting abortion rights, let’s direct the undecided voter to reflect on what a mom is supposed to do if she finds her fetus has Potter Syndrome, in which the lungs don’t develop. If she carries it to term, the baby will then die a painful death by being unable to breathe. It’s inhumane and patronizing to force that mom and baby into that situation — and the larger point is the need to leave the abortion decision to the person carrying the fetus. It’s her uterus, not ours.

Many men vociferously protest a “loss of freedom” when officials require them to wear masks to prevent the spread of a deadly disease; in the next breath, they demand that women be forced to carry and after nine months deliver a fetus?

The right wing’s obsession with abortion is relatively recent. Historically, abortion was allowed in early American history until quickening, the point in the second trimester when the mother feels the fetus moving. It wasn’t until the 19th century that states, beginning with Connecticut in 1821, began to ban abortion.

As recently as the early 1970s, the National Association of Evangelicals backed a limited right to abortion, and The Baptist Press welcomed the decision in Roe. A 1970 poll found that about two-thirds of Southern Baptist pastors supported allowing abortion in cases such as rape, deformity or a risk to the mother’s physical or mental well-being.

Yet in the years after Roe, the Christian Right become obsessed with the issue, and somehow it claims to be “pro-life” even as it often supports capital punishment and opposes universal health care.

More broadly, the anti-abortion lobby isn’t even good at reducing numbers of abortions. You want to know who the real champion of reducing abortion numbers was? It was President Obama, because he expanded insurance coverage of contraception. The result is that abortion rates have plunged in the U.S. to their lowest levels since Roe.

If the so-called pro-life community were serious about reducing the number of abortions, it would hail President Obama’s leadership and pursue the path of the country that probably has the lowest abortion rate in the industrialized world, the Netherlands. What Netherlands does is provide excellent comprehensive sex education and then free access to reliable forms of contraception. It doesn’t try to ban all abortion.

The right wing’s moralizing is patronizing in the extreme. I know Dr. Willie Parker, a Black feminist abortion doctor who has told me haunting tales about some of his patients. I’ll never forget a story he told of a 12-year-old girl who was a patient of his. A woman met the girl and offered some condescending advice: “Don’t you know not to go around with those boys?”

“He isn’t a boy,” the girl replied, speaking of the person who impregnated her. “He’s 53, and he’s my daddy.”

That’s a reminder that abortion is an issue that should always be left to a woman and her doctor. Whatever her reasons, it’s her call. And if Oregon can help those moms at a moment when their rights are in peril, it should.

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