Pregnant people crossing borders to have an abortion. People who have a miscarriage facing a prison sentence, or die from an infection. Doctors who do not perform life-saving procedures on a pregnant patient for fear of prosecution.
For years this was the kind of thing that happened in Poland, Nicaraguaor El Salvador. Now it is front page news in the United States.
If a scholar who studies the relationship between reproductive rights and political regimesI see the US mirroring a pattern that has occurred in authoritarian regimes around the world. When a government erects barriers to comprehensive reproductive care, it does not do so lightly cause more death and suffering for pregnant people and their families. This type of policy is often the case a first step in the gradual decline of democracies.
Yet the US is different in meaningful ways. Here, abortion has historically been viewed as a personal right to privacy. In many other countries I have studied, abortion is seen more as a collective right that is inextricably linked to broader social and economic issues.
The American individualistic perspective on abortion may make it more difficult for people in the US to understand why banning abortion can serve as a solution backdoor for the erosion of civil liberties – and of democracy itself.
Autocrats focus on abortion first
Restricting reproductive rights is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.
By Benito Mussolini’s Italy in 1926 and Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1936, to Francisco Franco’s Spain in 1941 and The Romans by Nicolae Ceaușescua In 1966, the first step most 20th-century dictators took after taking power was to criminalize abortion and contraception.
Initially, restricting access to abortion and contraception was a strategy for some of these autocratic leaders to gain the approval of the country’s religious leaders. The Catholic Church had great power, just like in Italy and Spain the Orthodox Church in Romania. At that time, these religions were against artificial birth control and still believe that life begins at conception.
Restrictions on reproductive rights also targeted Unpleasant increase birth rates after two world wars that had exterminated part of the population, especially in the Soviet Union and Italy. Many political leaders saw it reproduction as a national duty. They assigned women – white, heterosexual women – specific roles, primarily as mothers, to produce babies as well as future soldiers and workers for their regimes.
Over the past twenty years, countries in Europe and America have followed this recognizable pattern. Nicaragua And Poland both have banned abortion. Hungary, TurkeyAnd Russia have all restricted access to them.
Restricting reproductive freedoms has helped Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to sow lasting political divisions within society, allowing them to consolidate their own power.
These leaders raise a threat of moral and demographic declineclaiming that childless women, homosexual people and immigrants pose a threat to national survival. In doing so, they portray themselves as defenders of their respective nations. It is a way to regain and maintain popular support, even if their policies deepen poverty, eroding civil libertiesAnd increase corruption.
These politicians have also de facto taken power away from a significant portion of the population by reintroducing previous fascist-era restrictions on bodily autonomy. If feminist scholars have pointed out that strong reproductive rights are crucial for functioning democracies.
Restrictions on reproductive freedoms often require other types of restrictions to enforce and enforce them. These may include limits of freedom of expression which prohibit providers from discussing people’s reproductive options. Criminalizing political dissidents allows the arrest of people protesting restrictions on reproductive freedoms. Travel bans threaten incarceration for individuals who help youth obtain out-of-state abortion care.
When these civil liberties become weaker, it becomes more difficult to defend other rights. Without the right to speak, disagree, or move freely, people cannot have conversations, organize, or express collective grievances.
Placing the US in a global context
By 2022, the USA joined countries such as Poland and Hungary when the Supreme Court overturned the case Roe v. Wadeending nearly 50 years of federal abortion protections.
President Donald Trump was not in power when this happened. Yet the Supreme Court’s conservative majority took shape during his first term.
Since then, both the second Trump administration and many states have implemented this their own regulations or a ban on abortion. This has created a divided country in which… some statesabortion is as restricted as it is under some of the world’s most autocratic regimes.
Yet there is an important difference.
In the US, abortion is viewed by the law and the public as a matter of individual rights. The debate often boils down to the question of whether someone can terminate a pregnancy.
In many other contexts, reproductive rights are understood as a collective good that benefits society as a whole – or, conversely, harms society as a whole when withdrawn.
This perspective can be a powerful driver of change. For example, it’s how feminist groups in places like Argentina, ColombiaAnd Mexico have successfully pressured their governments to decriminalize abortion in recent years.
Since 2018, the movement has been known as The Green Wave of Latin America, or “Marea Verde” for their green protest bandanas, has done so consciously and strategically reformulated abortion as a human rightand used that claim to expand reproductive rights.
Latin American feminist activists have also documented how restricting abortion intensifies authoritarianism and deteriorates both individual and collective rights.
In a region where many citizens remember life under military dictatorship, highlighting the relationship between abortion and authoritarianism can be particularly galvanizing.
Limits to considering abortion as an individual right
Roo in 1973 recognized abortion as a personal medical decision between “the woman and her responsible doctorTo the point where the fetus is viable – roughly around 24 to 26 weeks – and that framework has stuck.
This was essentially what the mainstream pro-choice movement was advocating at the time. White feminists saw abortion rights as personal freedom. This framing has real limitations.
Like black and brown reproductive justice advocates have long pointed out, Roo has never served people of color or poor communities particularly well due to underlying unequal access to health care. Their work has illustrated the strong connection between racial, economic and reproductive justice for decades, yet abortion is still largely viewed as a purely individual issue.
When debates over reproductive freedoms are framed as fights over individual rights, it can create a legal quagmire. Other entities with rights emerge – the fetus, for example, or a potential grandparent – and are pitted against the pregnant person.
For example, recently a pregnant woman declared brain dead in Georgia was kept alive for several months until her fetus became viable, apparently to comply with the state’s strict anti-abortion law. Like her mother told the pressHer family had no say in the matter.
Emphasizing abortion as an individual right can also obscure why a ban on abortion has social consequences.
Research worldwide shows that reproductive freedoms are being limited not lead to fewer abortions. Abortion bans only make abortion dangerous when people turn to unregulated procedures. Maternal and infant mortality are risingespecially in marginalized communities.
Simply put, more pregnant people and babies die when abortion and contraception laws become more restrictive.
Other forms of suffering are also increasing. Pregnant people and their families tend to do this become poorer when contraception and abortion are difficult to obtain.
Abortion bans also lead to discriminatory health care practices that go beyond reproductive health services oncology, neurology and cardiology. For example, doctors who fear criminalization may be forced to withhold or change gold standard treatments for pregnant patients, or they may prescribe less effective medications out of concern about the legal consequences if patients later become pregnant.
Life-saving emergency room procedures must wait for a negative pregnancy test.
As a result, abortion bans reduce the quality and effectiveness of medical care for many patients, and not just those who are pregnant.
Defending reproductive freedoms for healthy democracies
These findings show why reproductive rights are truly a collective good. Viewed this way, it becomes clear why they are an essential part of democracy.
The rollback of reproductive freedoms in the US has already been followed by attempts to restrict other key areas of freedoms, including LGBTQ+ rights, freedom of expressionand the right to travel.
Access to safe abortion for pregnant people, gender-affirming care for trans youth, and international travel for noncitizens are intertwined rights—not isolated issues.
When the government begins to take away any of these rights, it signals serious problems for democracy.
This story was published in collaboration with The conversation VSa nonprofit news organization dedicated to unlocking expert knowledge for the public good.
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