All opinions expressed in this article are solely the opinions of the contributors.
The fight over the Texas abortion law is crowding courthouses at the state and federal levels. The Supreme Court recently ruled that a lawsuit challenging S.B. 8, which bans abortions in the state after six weeks of pregnancy, can proceed. In another case, a Texas man named Marcus Silva is suing three women he claims helped his ex-wife get an abortion. He’s suing under the wrongful death statute, alleging that helping someone get an abortion qualifies as murder. Straight Arrow News contributor Adrienne Lawrence says the Texas lawsuit is meant to scare people from helping women get abortions.
Silva’s lawsuit appears to be aimed at achieving the very same thing that Texas’s vague abortion ban does. That is, the suit seeks to scare people into not helping women end their pregnancies. Since the U.S. Supreme Court went ahead and rolled back Roe v. Wade back in June of last year, we’ve seen the patriarchy emerge from every crevice and corner of our country looking to craft laws that punish women into forced childbirth, even knowing the dangers.
According to a report conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, among 11 developed countries, the United States spends the highest percentage of its GDP on health care yet has the highest maternal mortality rate, a relative undersupply of maternity care providers, and it remains the only country not to guarantee access to provider home visits or paid parental leave post-baby. In fact, since 2000, the U.S. has seen an increase in maternal deaths, despite two-thirds of those deaths being deemed completely and totally preventable.
Our nation unnecessarily kills pregnant women at rates that are far higher than any of the other ten high-income countries that we consider to be peers. Given that knowledge, combined with the fact that, what, costs are constantly rising but wages are not, it only makes sense for women to not wish to procreate. If it’s not a potential death sentence, it’s damn sure a recipe for poverty.
And our leadership is doing nothing to help ameliorate some of those very real and very life-threatening concerns people have about childbirth. Rather, the patriarchy in power in these red states like Texas are [sic] instead looking to push pregnancy onto people and to create avenues by which we are punished for opting out of the maternal mortality roulette. This novel wrongful death Texas lawsuit is just a byproduct of that. It’s all rooted in the belief that men have a right to dictate what a woman does with her body.
