The practical anti-choice position is that if abortion must be legal nationwide, and the Supreme Court hasn’t upended that yet, it has to be as unpleasant and arduous as possible for the woman who has chosen it. Above, the Third Wave Foundation’s handy graphic on what that actually means in practice.
And much of that is even without the extra suite of constraints that certain states have imposed on some women. Just look at Amanda Marcotte’s list of 10 states where abortion is de facto illegal, where women are being arrested or clinics are being targeted in extraordinary ways.
The Third Wave report drew on calls to its Emergency Abortion Fund in 2010, which works alongside other national and local abortion funds that try and fill the gap left by the Hyde Amendment and low-income people who don’t qualify for Medicaid. “By almost every measure,” including health insurance coverage, unemployment, and homelessness, “our pledge recipients were economically worse off in 2010 than in any year since we started capturing this information in 2006.”
Reading the report and the devastating snapshops therein, it’s clear the net effect of all of these constraints, from limiting access to public funding to driving clinics out of business to adding expensive ultrasound procedures, is to make certain women’s terminations later, more expensive, and more potentially risky. Pro-life!
What It Really Takes To Get An Abortion [Third Wave]
EAF Report 2010 [Third Wave Foundation]
10 States Where Abortion Is Virtually Illegal For Some Women [Alternet]
