The two years since the end of abortion protection in the US: chaos, terror and setback

This Monday marks two years since the Supreme Court of USA overthrow the Roe vs. Wade ruling that protected the abortion at the national level. Abortion is today an odyssey for millions of women due to the restrictive regulations approved in many states, which also make life impossible for groups such as doctors or lawyers.

Since the TS, with a conservative majority, eliminated the protection that had existed since 1973, dozens of states have developed restrictive legislation: in 14 it is impossible to abort or the limit is six weeks, when many women do not know that they are pregnant, and in another seven it is They have put impediments and lowered deadlines.

In most of the 21 there are no exceptions for rape or incest and it is only possible when the mother’s life is in danger, a situation that has terrified doctors, who can face sentences of up to 99 years in prison for perform an abortion.

According to Noel Leondirector of Abortion Access Legal Defense Fund (LDF)the decision of the TS plunged half the country into “a legal chaos”.

Doctors, women or people who help them minimally can find themselves in trouble. “Even a taxi driver who transports a woman could be subject to a lawsuit”, he explains to EFE.

He Backgroundcreated by National Women’s Law Centeris one of the organizations that has emerged after the end of Roe vs. Wade to help, in this case, the defendants.

Many of them are doctors, a particularly resentful profession. According to EFE Jennifer Kleindirector of White House Gender Policy Committee and advisor to the president, Joe Biden, cannot stand the pressure and “they abandon their states”.

The restrictions will also haveImplications for training the next generation of physicians“, he adds, two situations that have a direct impact on the health of American women.

27 million women at risk

More than 27 million women of reproductive age live in one of 21 restrictive states, claims Klein. That is to say, “one in three women of reproductive age” in the country. “The impact is devastating”, he maintains.

To thousands of women, he adds, “They are turned away from emergency rooms or must travel hundreds of miles to receive care”. The most affected are Latinas and those of African American origin.

According to him Guttmacher Institutethe proportion of patients traveling to other states for abortions has doubled: from one in ten in 2020 to one in five in 2023.

Data from Center for American Progress They point out that travel times to access an abortion have multiplied by 300 in the last two years and the average driving time went from 33 minutes to two hours and 12 minutes.

But the situation is worsening in states like Florida, for example, which went from 22 minutes to nine hours and eight minutes.

Is the number of abortions going down?

The paradox is that the number of abortions is not going down, but rather going up. In 2023 there were more than 1 million, the highest rate in more than a decade and 10% more than in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

This is due, in part, to the increase in abortion with medications (mifepristone and misoprostol) instead of surgery.

And the conservative judges and extremist politicians of the Republican Party do not represent the true thoughts of citizens, Klein assures.

“A large majority of the American people believe that abortion should remain legal, regardless of their own beliefs.” and his political inclinations, he adds.

For this reason, abortion is destined to be one of the big issues of the November presidential campaign, since Biden’s team is aware that the strong defense that has been made from the White House can have returns at the polls.

Donald Trump (president between 2017 and 2021), however, is not completely clear on the issue, despite the fact that he has always boasted of having been the facilitator of the fall of the sentence that protected the right over their bodies from all Americans.

But anti-abortionists and extreme Republicans are asking to do more and have set a new goal that warns that the worst may be yet to come: ban the anti-abortion pill.