From The New York Times, June 26, 2022 "No, Justice Alito, Reproductive Justice Is in the Constitution" By Michele Goodwin
-The United States is the most dangerous place in the industrialized world to give birth, ranking 55th overall in the world
https://cddep.org/tool/worldwide-maternal-mortality-rates/
-Women are 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion.
-Justice Stephen Breyer, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, 2016
-Black women are over three times as likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term as white women.
-In Mississippi, a Black woman is 118 times as likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term as by having an abortion.
-According to the Mississippi Maternal Mortality Report, from 2013 to 2016, Black women accounted for “nearly 80 percent of pregnancy-related cardiac deaths” in that state. From Mississippi Maternal Mortality Report
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"Ending the forced sexual and reproductive servitude of Black girls and women was a critical part of the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments. The overturning of Roe v. Wade reveals the Supreme Court’s neglectful reading of the amendments that abolished slavery and guaranteed all people equal protection under the law. It means the erasure of Black women from the Constitution.
Mandated, forced or compulsory pregnancy contravenes enumerated rights in the Constitution, namely the 13th Amendment’s prohibition against involuntary servitude and protection of bodily autonomy, as well as the 14th Amendment’s defense of privacy and freedom.
This Supreme Court demonstrates a selective and opportunistic interpretation of the Constitution and legal history, which ignores the intent of the 13th and 14th Amendments, especially as related to Black women’s bodily autonomy, liberty and privacy which extended beyond freeing them from labor in cotton fields to shielding them from rape and forced reproduction. The horrors inflicted on Black women during slavery, especially sexual violations and forced pregnancies, have been all but wiped from cultural and legal memory. Ultimately, this failure disserves all women.
Overturning the right to abortion reveals the court’s indefensible disregard for the lives of women, girls and people capable of pregnancy, given the possible side effects and consequences of pregnancy, including gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia, hemorrhaging, gestational hypertension, ectopic pregnancy and death. State-mandated pregnancy will exacerbate what are already alarming health and dignity harms, especially in states with horrific records of maternal mortality and morbidity."
-Michele Goodwin from The New York Times, June 26, 2022