Last month, Donald Trump announced his pick to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, and there’s been much speculation about the future of Roe v. Wade. Trump’s nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, has only ruled on one notable abortion case in his tenure on the federal bench, ruling last year that it would not be an undue burden to make an undocumented immigrant wait longer — even though she was already 15 weeks pregnant — to receive an abortion.
From all of this has come countless stories from women who have had unsafe, illegal abortion procedures — and from all of these stories, it’s clear that the United States cannot go back to a time before Roe v. Wade.
Recently, a woman named Dev Howerton shared her story of an illegal abortion with Rolling Stone. Dev explained that she was living in South Carolina in 1970 and became unexpectedly pregnant. She knew she couldn’t continue the pregnancy, so she went for help to a man whose friends were in the “fast crowd, a little shady and living on the edge,” hoping that one of those friends would have a connection to an underground abortion provider.
Dev paid $400 for her abortion — a price that equates to roughly $2,500 today — and was driven in the dark to a motel “out in the Boondocks”. A man, introduced to Dev as a doctor, inserted a rubber tube into her uterus. Soon after, Dev miscarried. Luckily, the unsanitary, illegal abortion didn’t have any negative effects on Dev’s overall health, and she was able to have a healthy, planned pregnancy when the time was right.
There are so many women with stories like this, and there are so many women who will have to revert back to these unsanitary, unsafe procedures if Roe v. Wade is overturned.
As an ob-gyn, one of my greatest pleasures in life is delivering babies. I cannot stress enough, however, that more important than even that is my obligation to provide honest, factual, and safe medical care to all of my patients. Everyone has a choice when it comes to pregnancy, and everyone deserves to make that choice with respect, dignity, and privacy in the office of their health care provider. The key words here are choice and privacy. One does not have to choose to have an abortion, but to take that choice away from others is unconscionable. To insert oneself — or for the government to insert itself — into the private relationship between a pregnant person and their physician is illegal and should not be tolerated.
Kentucky legislators have expressed their intent to limit abortion to the maximum extent permitted if Roe v. Wade is overturned, and Indiana is also a state that would likely impose a lot of restrictions on safe, legal abortion procedures. In the 2018 legislative session, Indiana lawmakers passed several bills restricting access to abortion or making it harder to obtain an abortion, and Kentucky passed an extremely restrictive ban of its own.
It is imperative that we do everything we can to keep abortion safe, legal, and private in Indiana and Kentucky and in the United States. People who are pregnant must be allowed to make this choice in the privacy of their doctor’s offices and with the input of nobody other than their family and their health care provider. The right to make that choice must be protected with the same passion that we exhibit when fighting to protect any other basic human right, and we must make sure that we continue to elect people who will fight to protect a woman’s right to choose.
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