“There is cruelty towards women,” Hillary Clinton, former first lady and American secretary of state, recently deplored, with brief and desperate accuracy. And for good reason: south of the border, “red” states take turns competing in inhumanity to tighten this right to abortion which is practically no longer a right. With laws here, legal challenges there. A legislative and electoral trench war which, although theoretical for several of its protagonists, often male, has much more concrete consequences for those who suffer it on a daily basis.
The aberrations are appalling. A Texas woman who, turned away from the emergency room, ends up having a miscarriage in the hospital bathroom. Another who, having suffered the same fate at the reception of a hospital in North Carolina, gave birth in her car on the way to a second establishment and whose baby did not survive a birth in such circumstances. The ban on abortion is now such in the United States, in places, that it is even refused in cases of emergency.
This is the fight that Idaho led on Wednesday all the way to the American Supreme Court, the state contesting, like Texas, that the federal Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act forces their hospitals to provide an interruption of pregnancy to stabilize a patient in case emergency. A semantic debate, with deadly danger, between the obligation to protect a mother’s health or only to save her life as a very last resort.
In Arizona, on Thursday, this abominable decision by seven Republican judges came into force, having validated a law dating from 1864 and prohibiting all abortion, including in cases of rape or incest. The life of the mother again prevails as the sole exception. Fortunately, the state attorney general — a Democrat — promised she would not impose it.
On the side of Florida, to which the even more deprived residents of neighboring states fell, abortion will be prohibited beyond barely six weeks of gestation (i.e. sometimes even before a woman realizes that she is pregnant). ) from 1er may.
The abolition of the rampart offered by the judgment Roe v. Wade, by protecting access to abortion, opened the floodgates to its complete or near-complete ban in nearly half of the states. Without these setbacks pleasing the population, since a Gallop poll revealed, a year after this revocation by the Supreme Court, that a record number of Americans would prefer that abortion remain legal and that 52% say they now today pro-choice, a high in 25 years. Even half of Republicans oppose the complete ban validated in Arizona, as do 82% of Democratic voters.
It is therefore not surprising that President Joe Biden traveled this week to Florida, an important pivotal state, to denounce Donald Trump’s “responsibility” for “this American nightmare”. And to try to mobilize support.
Former President Donald Trump, entangled in his criminal trial in New York, is awkwardly balancing the wishes of a Republican fringe in a cabal against abortion (but not only that, also targeting the abortion pill as well as fertilization in vitro) and the popular anxiety and suffering that this crusade is sowing in the country. Vasouillard, Donald Trump boasts both of being “the person proudly responsible” for having allowed the cancellation of Roe v. Wadewhile ensuring that he would not endorse, if he is re-elected president, a federal ban on abortion, after having previously promised it.
This social debate, which favored the Democrats in the elections held for two years, the Republicans are reasonably worried that it will once again play spoilsport in the November elections. Although women’s rights may be shaky, their determination to defend them fortunately seems unshakeable.
Hillary Clinton also criticized Canada 14 years ago when Stephen Harper’s conservative government excluded funding for abortion and family planning from its major international aid initiative for maternal and child health. Maternal health does not go without reproductive health, she said at the time.
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre did not specify where he stands in this regard. And although he insists that a government under his leadership would not legislate in the area of abortion, he would nevertheless authorize the third of his caucus opposing it to present such parliamentary initiatives, as was the case last year.
The fierce fight that American women are waging on behalf of all their sisters is a source of hope, but also a call to order. That in the space of less than two years their achievements have been shattered is nothing reassuring. The women will have to watch, vigilantly, this half-open door.