Before the Supreme Court last Wednesday, the arguments of the State of Idaho were not subtle: women’s bodies are negligible and the fact that they could lose their lives is an acceptable risk.
Idaho Code Section 18-622 provides a total ban on termination of pregnancy, a category of crime (felony) equivalent to murder for those who carry it out, high criminal sanctions applicable to any person involved (patient, practitioner, facilitator). The exception provided for — the case where the mother’s life is in danger — has led to abuses where people in emergency situations were not treated until their vital prognosis was in jeopardy. As in the case of an ectopic pregnancy (therefore not viable) and treatable initially, with significant and avoidable damage.
How imminent must death be, one doctor asked, “for one to finally decide to intervene”?
Because the decision Dobbs overturning the judgment Roe v. Wade never stops bouncing. She is redrawing the geography of health in the United States by tracing the contours of veritable gynecological deserts. It allows the criminalization of abortion, literally pushing women to flee their state to save their lives. It is redefining medical practice while a wind of fear is blowing through the health system: care varies from one state to another, from one hospital to another, from one social class to another, from one color to another. They are no longer assured on a factual and scientific basis. It has impacts in gynecology, perinatal care, pharmacology, when we deny access to abortion to a child who has been raped, when we refuse medication to a person suffering from an autoimmune disease. -immune on the grounds that they are also used to terminate pregnancies. It has impacts in oncology, if we have to wait until a cancer becomes widespread and reaches a lethal stage to proceed with an interruption (which we knew was necessary from the start) of the pregnancy. It has an impact in obstetrics: to avoid the appearance of an abortion, for example, doctors have opted for cesarean section rather than curettage following a miscarriage.
Yet science is there to say it: it is more dangerous to carry a pregnancy to term than to interrupt it; it is more risky to proceed by cesarean section than by vaginal route. Why do some bodies suddenly have less value? Why now ?
Because the issue is neither fetal life nor the mother’s health. Nativism and reproductive health, researchers Coughlin and King explain, have gone hand in hand from the beginning. The racial component of reproductive health care, whether abortion was banned out of a need for cheap labor (as in the slave states of the South in the 19e century) or that it is encouraged for population reasons, is documented.
As James Mohr explains in his work on the issue, the rise of the anti-abortion movement took place in a period when recourse to termination of pregnancy was nevertheless socially widespread: faced with increasing Catholic immigration, the fear of decline demographic is then one of the explicit motivations for limiting the abortion resorted to by married, white and Protestant women.
However, explain Coughlin and King, if the 1960s and 1970s saw concomitant progress in the rights of women and minorities, the years 2010-2020 see the opposite synchronic movement: the decision Shelby v. Holder County (ending federal control over discriminatory voting practices in Southern states) occurs in the same space-time as the decision Dobbs on abortion.
And in two cases pending in 2024 before the Supreme Court (Idaho and FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine), we find the same far-right organization, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “hateful”.
It is in this light that we must look at the current phenomenon, and take another step back.
The global Women Peace and Security Index evaluates 177 countries based on 13 indicators ranging from maternal mortality to political violence, including elements of inclusion and discrimination: it makes it possible to establish the close link between women’s rights and the state of democracy (by the way, neither the United States nor Canada appear in the 15 states at the top of the list).
Professor Nitasha Kaul explains the central role of misogyny in legitimizing the political objectives of a set of leaders of contemporary democracies (Modi, Bolsonaro, Milei, Orbàn, Erdoğan, Trump): she demonstrates how identity politics can allowing the opposition to be demonized as feminine, inferior and/or anti-nationalist, by distorting progressive ideas (witness the drift of the term “wokism”) and by defending a masculinist and militarized approach to politics.
At Harvard, Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks agree with this when they talk about the “revenge of the patriarchs” and why autocrats (established or aspiring) seek to erode women’s rights. As proof, they point to Xi Jinping’s crushing of feminist movements, Vladimir Putin’s promotion of traditional roles, the return of patrilineality in Egypt, or the Taliban in Afghanistan.
In The First Political Order. How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide, Professors Hudson, Bowen and Nielsen explain the attacks on women’s movements and rights: both in authoritarian regimes and in eroded democracies, these measures are directly linked to the mobilizing power of women. The language around the danger that progressive norms pose to cultural and family traditions, and the policies aimed at readjusting reproductive rights, correspond to the desire to contain this mobilizing potential. Research shows that the mobilization of women in a popular movement obviously adds in number, but also in legitimacy, in resistance processes and in the probability of success.
Free, active and politicized women are therefore a clear threat to illiberalism and authoritarianism cloaked in populism: their erasure is therefore an effective political strategy.
Professor of international studies at CMR Saint-Jean and essayist, Élisabeth Vallet is director of the geopolitics observatory of the Raoul-Dandurand Chair.