Roe v Wade: 50 years later
“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”
“Never forget that it only takes one political, economic or religious crisis for women's rights to be put in jeopardy. Those rights are never to be taken for granted, you must remain vigilant throughout your life.”
By Mara Ricoy Olariaga, Birth Educator, Activist and Writer
Today January 22nd marks the 50th anniversary of Roe v Wade. The strangest thing is that I have to erase the word celebrate from this text. The strangest thing is that we have somehow gone back in terms of women’s rights. Actually, no, we haven’t gone back - we have gone somewhere else.
Mara Ricoy Olariaga, Birth Educator, Activist and Writer
In 1973, and to the surprise of many American feminists, Roe v Wade became a great victory in the United States for those who had fought for years to come out of the “sinful” clandestinity imposed on women who sought to have control over their bodies and reproductive rights. And in the chronology of the movements seeking freedom in the whole world, it made sense. Feminists were fighting everywhere, louder than ever, to gain equal rights, which also extended to having control over our reproductive rights. Our male partners could always “terminate” their parenting responsibilities by walking out of relationships, while we women, on the other hand, had to deal with the physical reality of unwanted pregnancies.
And this is what a woman named Norma McCorvey had to face in 1969 when she discovered that she was pregnant with her third child. Norma wanted to terminate the pregnancy but couldn't due to the law in Texas. At the time, Texan law only allowed abortions if they were done to save the life of the mother. She tried to claim that her pregnancy was the result of a rape, which didn’t work, and she also attempted to get an illegal abortion, but there were no places offering them, as the last one had been closed down by the police. So Norma found herself in the very same place where many women did, limited by the options: keeping the baby or risking her life or freedom by going against the law. So she decided to seek legal help. In 1970, her attorneys filed a suit on behalf of Norma under the alias ‘Jane Roe’. After the first round of arguments, all seven justices of the court agreed that the law should be struck down, but on varying grounds.
However, Justice Harry Blackmun proposed that the case be reargued, and on October 11, 1972, the case was again argued before the Supreme Court with Henry Wade, Dallas County District Attorney, as the defendant. On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court issued a decision stating that women in the U.S. had a right to choose whether to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. Unfortunately, the case took so long that Norma McCorvey had given birth, and the child was put up for adoption.
Some might think that progress happens on an ascendent line, but if I reflect on where we are 50 years after Roe v Wade, I know that this is not the case.
I was born a year after Roe v Wade in a country exiting the dictatorship of a military general who took over Spain by a coup. His fascist imposition of catholicism, three years of war and 40 years of obscurantism had left my country unrecognisable to the point that not many of us knew its recent history. Prior to that coup, Spain had been revolutionary during a brief republic and women, thanks to a woman named Federica Montseny, were even able to have legal abortions in 1937. Something that was only done at that time in Switzerland (since 1916), the former Czech Republic (since 1925), Russia (since 1926) and Japan (since 1929).
But over 40 years later, when I was a child, abortions were not even spoken about. I learned that when grown-ups talked in Spain about “a quick trip to London” with a nudge and a wink, they were talking about abortion; London was the place to terminate a pregnancy for women in the 80s in Spain.
I didn’t know until years later that my mum, growing up in 1940s Spain, learned a different code for abortion. “She is going to see Ms Lola”, whispered amongst women, meant to go to an unregistered midwife to terminate a pregnancy. When midwives became registered in Spain, they had to swear not to practise abortions.
Women have always practised abortions and looked for ways to terminate pregnancies, and men have always sought to control the reproductive power of women, but the arguments and ideas around how to do so vary. In my country, it was as late as 1985 when women were legally able to terminate their pregnancies.
But back to the United States, it was around the 1980s when the “pro-life” argument won a lot of attention, and the republicans realised it was a perfect populist narrative to mobilise the most conservative, racist and misogynist sections of voters. It works perfectly, like a Disney movie for the far right, because it is an old patriarchal narrative: the mother as a vessel, the Virgin Mary as a sort of redundant container, the baby as a potential human, life as sacred… And all that, mixed with the great ignorance that still persists about pregnancy, helps to propagate anti-abortionist propaganda. But, of course, this is an argument that ignores women, and women’s lives, especially those who are poor, those who are black and those who are raped. And the narrative also ignores the potential lives of those children that the so-called pro-lifers defend and speculate with. But regardless, anti-abortion is the essential item in the political agenda to gain conservative votes in some states in North America.
In 1973, the main argument of Roe V Wade was based on the constitutional right to privacy. And it was overturned in 2022 for the interpretation of this. As a birth educator and a mother, I have observed many times that pregnancy is often considered a public affair. This goes from touching the mother’s belly by strangers to the discussions and perceptions of who decides over the birth and the baby. In my classes with expectant parents, quite often, one of the most controversial and difficult-to-accept pieces of information I give is that the decision-making during childbirth belongs to the mother and no one else.
Those who call themselves pro-life promote their argument from the entitlement of overruling the mother’s decision, “this is not for her to decide” seems to underpin all their mantras.
It seems to me that despite the freedoms gained and regardless of the improvements of laws in different countries, pregnancy is somehow still understood to be a public affair, something that belongs to society, and also something that women should be willing to share with others. This is often used in arguments to promote the reproductive exploitation of women - surrogacy constantly uses the idea of generosity to cover the horror of gifting or selling human beings.
And in relation to pregnancy, I have heard lines from young generations that are as old as witch-hunting, “women must be supervised”, “women have too much power”, and “women can be irrational”. But we women are the ones who birth the future, and even this scientific fact in 2023 is still debatable.
Not only has Roe v Wade been overturned (24th June, 2022) with different implications in each state, but many of them are reinstating abortion bans and putting the freedom back in the hands of politicians to decide on the limits that can be imposed on women’s decisions.
In my country, Spain, as I write this article, the far-right party, Vox, in the region of Castilla-La Mancha, is trying to force doctors to make women listen to the heartbeat of the foetus and see a 4D scan before an abortion, something which is required by law in Kentucky.
The year Roe v Wade was overturned began with the death of Agnieszka T in Poland, another case of sepsis due to a catholic country refusing to remove an (inviable) foetus from a dying woman.
Meanwhile, also during that time, the European Union elected a new president, Roberta Metsola, a conservative lawmaker from Malta, a country where abortion is illegal, something she agrees with.
The rights of women have always been fragile because they aren't truly considered rights but rather the demands of some nagging feminists or some capricious wishes that an androcentric world cannot understand. They are tokens used in political campaigns, or their loss is even thought of as collateral damages.
But we have recently entered uncharted territories. Now scientific institutions, supported by new politics, suggest that women don’t have the exclusivity of birthing or even to define themselves as women. The NHS website speaks about ‘chestfeeding’ and taking testosterone during pregnancy. We are now dealing with a new complexity regarding women’s rights. No longer going backwards but rather reinventing reality, finding alternative ways of ignoring our needs but with the old misogyny still intact.
While the developed world fancies a debate on who and what a woman is, developing countries bear the burden of 97% of all unsafe abortions. More than half of all unsafe abortions occur in Asia, most of them in South and Central Asia. In Latin America and Africa, most (approximately 3 out of 4) abortions are unsafe. In Africa, nearly half of all abortions occur under the least safe circumstances, according to the World Health Organisation.
For the United States to lose such a fundamental right, conquered 50 years ago, is both a tragedy for the women in that country and a severe symptom of the unhealthy state of women’s rights everywhere.
I hope that this 50th anniversary of Roe v Wade will see many women taking to the streets of the United States of America. I hope they will honour the memory of Gerri Santoro and the many other women who died trapped with illegal abortions as their only choice, but also the memory of doctors, volunteers and staff from abortion clinics killed by the so-called pro-life movement in the United States.
The boundaries of Life and Death that Poe suggested as shadowy have always been understood very clearly by those of us who could give birth and who were willing to take risks for our freedom to choose when to do so.