Pessimism And Roe v Wade
The case of Roe v Wade is a 1973 landmark judgment in the history of the United States of America when a woman demanded the right to abortion as her fundamental right and after a lengthy and tiring legal battle, the case resulted in the favor of the plaintiff.
The case caused a stir in the nation and debates brewed in the streets of the people’s democracy. Although women were given liberty to abort as they wished, there are people who still pity upon the idea of such an act if it continues to be carried out without any harm or obligation.
Recently, in Texas a young American girl aged 13 who was raped and as a result impregnated, could not get an abortion as she would have had to travel to New Mexico to get operated and her family could not afford that, making her a single parent in addition to being a rape victim.
The American legislators have been alleged to make laws with which the people cannot comply; these laws are sometimes even deemed as ‘trap laws’.
American law allows abortion but many States have started making laws that are incoherent with fundamental rights, thus making access to abortion a nightmare. The States are closing down local clinics which assist in abortion, so even though people have rights, they have no remedies!
The problem does not end here and finding themselves shunned, the women end up aborting by themselves. A woman at a hospital recalls getting a call from a girl who was in her kitchen closet with a knife! And the rest is just scary!
The University of Texas in a research study found that nearly 240,000 Texan women try to self-abort, and these are statistics from just one city and include episodes such as women showing up in emergency rooms hemorrhaging and trying to harm themselves to self abort.
A recently enacted law in Texas requires medics who perform abortions to have admitting privileges to local hospitals while clinics in Texas are required to be licensed in the same way as a mini hospital. This scenario looks normal with a commonsense requirement on paper but in reality most of the hospitals won’t give credentials to such clinics.
Every year, large crowds gather outside the constitutional avenue to protest against Roe v Wade but the US Supreme Court still supports Roe v Wade as a legal option for the Y chromosome, but as the abortion opponents have not been able to overturn the court’s decision, they are instead trying to curb this right by going around the Constitution which is not a good omen for democracy.
In Pakistan, the Punjab Assembly has recently passed the Protection of Women Against Violence Act which has received similar criticism by the religious class, but even if the law was that bad, we must work around it, not wander around it!
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of CourtingTheLaw.com or any organization with which he might be associated.
