During his eight years in the White House, one of the themes President Obama frequently reflected on in speeches was the non-linear nature of social progress. “Progress doesn’t travel in a straight line,” he told Rutgers students in his commencement address in 2016. “It remains uneven and at times for every two steps forward, it feels like we take one step back.”
Those words feel particularly apt in relation to women’s rights. In the last year, the #MeToo movement has seen women globally assert their right to live and work without the threat of sexual assault and harassment. But in the world’s wealthiest democracy, women’s reproductive rights are more imperilled than they have been in 30 years.
Last Friday, President Trump’s administration confirmed it would be reviving the “gag rule”, introduced by Ronald Reagan in 1988 but rescinded by Bill Clinton before it was ever implemented. Under this rule, health clinics offering reproductive health services that either provide or refer women to abortion services are barred from receiving any federal funds.
As it was during Reagan’s presidency, this rule will be subject to legal challenge. But if implemented, it would have the effect of further limiting women’s access to abortion in the US. While a woman’s right to abortion was established by the historic supreme court case Roe v Wade in 1973, in many states, access to abortion has been gradually chipped away by the introduction of restrictions on abortion clinics, such as insisting that doctors performing abortions have admitting privileges at a local hospital. Hospitals often refuse doctors working at clinics these privileges; a doctor at the only remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi was refused admitting privileges at no fewer than seven hospitals. In this way, state legislators can make it virtually impossible for abortion clinics to exist.
Trump’s intervention also follows several states introducing new limits on abortions that directly contravene Roe v Wade, in a deliberate attempt to get the supreme court, which now has a conservative majority, to reopen the issue. It comes after his reinstatement of an international version of the gag rule that bans any international health clinics providing or discussing abortion services with women from receiving US development funds.
It is difficult to overstate what is at stake. Access to reliable contraception and safe abortion has unshackled women from the burdens of unwanted pregnancy. Women’s progress in the workplace and in society has been utterly reliant on the realisation of their reproductive rights. But 80,000 woman still die every year worldwide as a result of unsafe abortions, while more than a billion women live in countries where abortion is banned altogether unless her life is at risk. If abortion rights were set back three decades in the US, this would not only have appalling consequences for those American women denied a safe abortion as a result – it would also send a terrible moral signal to the rest of the world.
Those who argue against abortion rights say they do so out of moral concern. Yet throughout history, women have sought abortions whether or not they are legal and whether or not they are safe. Abortion is no less common in countries where it is banned. Latin America is home to some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world, yet its abortion rate is higher than in Africa and Asia and more than double that in North America. What makes the difference is not whether abortion is legal, but whether women can access contraception. The only consequence of restricting access to abortion is that more women die as a result of seeking abortion in dangerous settings. Their deaths should be a blight on the conscience of all anti-abortion campaigners.
It’s not just the US where women’s rights are at risk. Here in Europe, even as Ireland stands on the brink of a historic referendum on the legalisation of abortion, the rise of the far right in countries such as Poland represents a threat. There, the ruling Law and Justice party is pushing for further restrictions on abortion, which is already banned in most circumstances.
Complacency in the UK would be misplaced. Our abortion law remains stuck in Victorian times: abortion is still a criminal offence and a woman is only permitted to have an abortion if two doctors confirm that continuing with the pregnancy poses a greater risk to her physical or mental health, or that of her existing children, than terminating it. This is demeaning, paternalistic and out of step with public opinion: 70% of the public believe a woman should be able to access an abortion if she does not want to proceed with the pregnancy. Women living in Northern Ireland have to travel to mainland Britain to access abortion and, until recently, had to pay. Our antiquated laws mean that women having a medical abortion have to take pills at a clinic that can perfectly safely be taken at home, then rush to get home, sometimes in severe pain, before they start to miscarry.
Two steps forward, one step back. That step backwards causes pain and ruins lives. It’s not inevitable, but preventing it means never taking progress for granted or banking it and moving on. The fight for social change will never truly be over.