Result of a global mobilization of feminist groups in the 1960s, the ruling “Roe v. Wade” forced the entire United States to legalize abortion. Its possible repeal would be a “symbol” that would “reinforce anti-abortion movements” in the world, warn several researchers.
On January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court decided in its landmark ruling “Roe v. Wade” that the right to respect for private life guaranteed by the Constitution applied to abortion. The voluntary termination of pregnancy was legalized in all states of the country.
But a draft Supreme Court ruling, revealed last week by the Politico information website, finds that there is nothing in the Constitution that protects the right to abortion.
“Seeing a country as predominant as the United States go back on this right would have a strong symbolic weight, it would give an important dynamic to the anti-abortion movements around the world. The discourse will be: if the United States does not support this right anymore, why does it support?” Andréanne Bissonnette, a researcher at the University of Québec in Montreal, told AFP.
The right to abortion has recently expanded in countries with significant influence from the Catholic Church: Ireland in 2018, Argentina in 2020, Mexico in 2021 and Colombia this year.
If the attitude towards abortion changes at the federal level in the United States, this “could give legitimacy to anti-abortion movements and their demands in certain countries,” reiterates Véronique Pronovost, who is doing her doctorate at the University of Québec in Montreal.
“Bills that propose to “frame” the abortion law by adding limitations to access to services (parental obligation for minors, prohibition of terminating pregnancy in the third trimester…) could from now on be considered acceptable, even advisable,” he warns AFP.
already complicated
“The greatest risk is that the “pro-choice” position (free and free access to abortion) will be marginalized and that from now on it will be considered “extremist”, just like the pure and simple prohibition of the right to abortion”, insists the sociologist.
The historian Bibia Pavard, from the French university Panthéon-Assas, recalls that “many American states already prevent the benefit of a total right to abortion: Texas prohibits abortions when the heart of the fetus can already be heard, that is to say at six weeks, while that in other places is authorized while the fetus is not viable outside the uterus, that is to say 24 weeks”.
“Other states ask women to look at an ultrasound to see the fetus, they apply processes that make access to the IVE (Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy) very complex,” he says. “It’s already complicated in several states.”
The “pro-life” movement, influential in the United States since the “Roe v. Wade” ruling, is a “model” for anti-abortion mobilization around the world, according to Bibia Pavard. As was the case for the “pro-choice” mobilizations in the 1960s, there is “an intense circulation of arguments, of people,” according to the historian.
According to her, in France, for example, the anti-abortion movements are renewing themselves, thanks to a new generation that has transformed the ways of communicating, using social networks above all. For these groups it would be “a symbol of success, since it would show that it is possible to undo a law that seemed guaranteed.”