Pregnant women crossing borders to have an abortion. People who have abortions face prison sentences or die from infection. Doctors who do not perform life-saving procedures on a pregnant patient for fear of prosecution.
For years, this was the kind of thing that happened in Poland, Nicaragua or El Salvador. Now, it’s front-page news in the United States.
As a scholar who studies the relationship between reproductive rights and political regimes, I see the United States as reflecting a pattern that has occurred in authoritarian regimes around the world. When a government erects barriers to comprehensive reproductive care, it not only causes more death and suffering for women and their families. Such policies are often a first step in the gradual decline of democracies.
However, the United States is different in one significant way. Here, abortion was historically framed as a personal right to privacy. In many other countries I studied, abortion is seen more as a collective right that is inextricably linked to broader social and economic problems.
America’s individualistic perspective on abortion can make it difficult for people in the US to understand why banning abortion can serve as a backdoor to the erosion of civil liberties and democracy itself.
Autocrats target abortion first
Restriction of reproductive rights is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.
From Benito Mussolini’s Italy in 1926 and Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1936 to Francisco Franco’s Spain in 1941 and Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania in 1966, the first move most 20th century dictators made after taking power was to criminalize abortion and contraception.
Initially, for some of these autocratic leaders, limiting access to abortion and contraception was a strategy to gain approval from the nation’s religious leaders. The Catholic Church had great power in Italy and Spain, as did the Orthodox Church in Romania. At the time, these religions opposed artificial birth control and still believe that life begins at conception.
Restrictions on reproductive rights were also aimed at increasing birth rates after two world wars that had wiped out part of the population, particularly in the Soviet Union and Italy. Many political leaders viewed procreation as a national duty. They designated women, that is, white, heterosexual women, specific roles, primarily as mothers, to produce babies, as well as future soldiers and workers for their regimes.
Over the past two decades, countries in Europe and the Americas have followed this recognizable pattern. Nicaragua and Poland banned abortion. Hungary, Türkiye and Russia clamped down on access to it.
Restricting reproductive freedoms has helped Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stoke long-standing political divisions within society that help them consolidate their own power.
These leaders invoke a threat of moral and demographic decline, claiming that childless women, queer people, and immigrants pose a danger to national survival. In doing so, they present themselves as defenders of their respective nations. It is a way to regain and retain popular support even as their policies deepen poverty, erode civil liberties and increase corruption.
These politicians also disempowered a significant portion of the population by reinstating previous fascist-era restrictions on bodily autonomy. As feminist scholars have noted, strong reproductive rights are fundamental to functioning democracies.
Restrictions on reproductive freedoms often require other types of restrictions to enforce and maintain them. These could include limits on free speech that prohibit providers from discussing people’s reproductive choices. Criminalizing political dissent allows the arrest of people protesting restrictions on reproductive freedoms. Travel bans threaten people who help young people obtain abortion services out of state with prison sentences.
When these civil liberties are weakened, it becomes more difficult to defend other rights. Without the right to speak, dissent or move freely, people cannot engage in conversation, organize or express collective grievances.
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Putting the United States in a global context
In 2022, the United States joined countries like Poland and Hungary when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending 50 years of federal protections against abortion.
President Donald Trump was not in power when this happened. However, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority was formed during its first term.
Since then, both the second Trump administration and many states have enacted their own abortion regulations or bans. This has created a divided country where in some states abortion is as restricted as it is under some of the world’s most autocratic regimes.
However, there is a key difference.
In the US, the law and the public view abortion as a matter of individual rights. The debate often comes down to whether a person should be allowed to terminate their pregnancy.
In many other contexts, reproductive rights are understood as a collective good that benefits all of society or, conversely, harms all of society when revoked.
This perspective can be a powerful driver of change. It’s how, for example, women’s and feminist groups in places like Argentina, Colombia and Mexico have successfully pressured their governments to decriminalize abortion in recent years.
Since 2018, the movement known as Latin America’s Green Wave, or “Green Tide” for its green protest scarves, has deliberately and strategically reframed abortion as a human right and used that assertion to expand reproductive rights.
Latin American feminist activists have also documented how restricting abortion intensifies authoritarianism and worsens individual and collective rights.
In a region where many citizens remember life under a military dictatorship, highlighting the relationship between abortion and authoritarianism can be particularly galvanizing.
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Limits of framing abortion as an individual right
Wade in 1973 recognized abortion as a private medical decision between “the woman and her responsible physician” up to the point of fetal viability, roughly around 24 to 26 weeks, and that framework has remained.
This was basically what the pro-choice movement stood for at the time. White feminists viewed the right to abortion as a personal freedom. This framing has real limitations.
As Black and brown reproductive justice advocates have long noted, Roe never served women of color or poor people particularly well because of the underlying inequality in access to health care. Her work, for decades, has illustrated the strong connection between racial, economic, and reproductive justice, but abortion is still largely seen as a solely individual issue.
When debates over reproductive freedoms are framed as fights for individual rights, it can create a legal quagmire. Other entities with rights emerge, the fetus, for example, or a potential grandparent, and confront the pregnant person.
Recently, for example, a pregnant woman declared brain dead in Georgia was kept alive for several months until her fetus became viable, apparently to comply with the state’s strict anti-abortion law. As his mother told the press, his family had no say in the matter.
Focusing narrowly on abortion as an individual right can also obscure why banning it has social impacts.
Research around the world shows that restricting reproductive freedoms does not lead to fewer abortions. Abortion bans only make abortion dangerous as people turn to unregulated “back alley” procedures. Maternal and infant mortality rates are increasing, especially in marginalized communities.
Bottom line: More women and babies die when abortion and contraception laws become more restrictive.
Other types of suffering also increase. Women and their families tend to become poorer when contraception and abortion are difficult to obtain.
Abortion bans also lead to discriminatory practices in health care beyond reproductive health services, such as oncology, neurology, and cardiology. Doctors who fear criminalization are forced to withhold or alter gold standard treatments for pregnant patients, for example, or may prescribe less effective medications for fear of legal consequences should patients later become pregnant.
Life-saving procedures in the emergency room must wait for a negative pregnancy test.
As a result, abortion bans decrease the quality and effectiveness of health care for many patients, not just those who are pregnant.
Defending reproductive freedoms for healthy democracies
These findings demonstrate why reproductive rights are truly a collective good. When seen this way, it illuminates why they are an essential element of democracy.
The rollback of reproductive freedoms in the US has already been followed by efforts to limit other key areas of freedoms, including LGBTQ rights, freedom of expression and the right to travel.
Access to safe abortion for pregnant people, gender-affirming care for trans youth, and international travel for non-citizens are intertwined rights, not isolated issues.
When the government starts taking away any of these rights, I think it is a serious problem for democracy.
*Seda Saluk is an assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan.
This article was originally published on The Conversation
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