The US government has overturned Roe V. Wade. This has given the government the ability to take significant rights away from women, which in turn has led to banning abortion. In 1973, the U.S supreme court’s ruling in Roe V. Wade acknowledged the fact that the decision to end or continue a pregnancy purely belonged to the individual. Roe guaranteed that “liberty” in the 14th amendment of the US Constitution, put in place to protect the privacy of individuals would include the right to abort. In 2022, that all changed when the U.S Supreme Court neglected its obligation to protect fundamental rights and overturned Roe V. Wade. This action marks the first time in history that the Supreme Court has taken away an existing fundamental right.
Currently, the right to contraception is protected by two Supreme Court decisions, Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) and Grisworld v. Connecticut (1965). The Griswold decision acknowledged the constitutional right to privacy includes the right to married couples to obtain contraceptives. Before the Griswold decision, a number of states continued to have contraceptives inaccessible for both single or non married people. The High Court then decided through Eisenstadt to extend the protection of Griswold to unmarried people.
The abortion ban in Tennessee, for instance, defines pregnancy as “the reproductive condition of having a living unborn child within (the pregnant person’s) body throughout the entire embryonic and fetal stages of the unborn child from conception until birth”. Abortion bans state that pregnancy exists from the moment of fertilization, preventing the conception of an egg could be construed as terminating the pregnancy. This definition could give the Supreme Court an excuse to restrict or ban contraceptive methods that people ignorantly believe end pregnancy.
Missouri defines abortion as “[the] termination of the pregnancy of a mother by using or prescribing any instrument, device, medicine, drug, or other means or substance with an intention other than to increase the probability of a live birth or to remove a dead unborn child”. The ban only establishes personhood for fertilized eggs, not including the definition of pregnancy. Once the abortion ban was put into place in Missouri a major hospital system promptly refused to provide Plan B, out of fear of charges that could have resulted from a prosecutor’s misunderstanding of how Plan B works.
According to a GOP– backed anti-abortion bill in Oklahoma there could possibly be a ban put in place to ban emergency contraception and would create a database of people who undergo an abortion. The current House Bill 3216 of Oklahoma states that there would possibly prohibit the sale, prescription, and administration of contraceptives intended to instigate an abortion or prevent a pregnancy. This would include IUD’s, the “morning after pill”, and “Plan B”. These restrictions will be put in place, due to the misunderstanding that certain contraceptives are abortifacients, which is any substance that induces abortion or miscarriage.
