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Quinebaug Valley Reproductive Rights for Women

Reproductive Rights & The Supreme Court

Historically, the courts have often been central to reproductive rights. From the 1960s-70s, reproductive rights were expanded through a series of Supreme Court cases highlighted in a timeline by the ACLU, which enshrined rights to contraceptives and abortion under rights to privacy.

Supreme Court Justice and reproductive rights champion Ruth Bader Ginsberg argued the case Susan Struck v. Secretary of Defense (1970) (see below) would better-protected abortion based on the right to equal protection rather than the right to privacy. The Struck case supported a woman’s right to choose to continue a pregnancy or abort it based on equality protection since women alone carry children, which impacts opportunities. 

Abortion is an important option for low-income women and families with limited work and family options. Who gets abortions in America? The majority of women who have abortions have one or more child and are low-income. People have abortions for many reasons including family planning & timing, relationship status or abuse, health, finances, or educational situation. Abortion restrictions hurt vulnerable women and families, and black women suffer the most without Roe.

When carried out by a medical professional, abortion is a relatively safe health care intervention. However, unsafe abortions are often the result of people lacking the necessary medical skills or are performing the procedure in an environment that lacks medical standards. 

When rights are restricted, this increases the likelihood of unsafe abortions. In the United States, abortion rights have been chipped away in subsequent court rulings, including Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992), which ruled abortions can be regulated to protect mothers and viable fetuses, which opened Roe v. Wade to state level abortion restrictions.

Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022 by Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. Now individual states decide abortion access. See this interactive map of state-by-state access to abortion.

While abortions are restricted and illegal in many states, anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers have expanded post-Dobbs decision (ending Roe v. Wade’s abortion protection). Crisis pregnancy centers claim to provide pregnancy counseling and prenatal services from an anti-abortion perspective. However, studies have found the majority of the time, they present false or misleading health information, including spreading untruths about links between abortions and breast cancer, offering few medical services, dissuading women from abortions, and pushing them toward parenting or adoption.

The centers are not regulated since they are not medical practices, but they are viewed by many as unethical. In National Institute of Family and Life Advocate V. Becerra (2018), the Supreme Court ruled that crisis pregnancy centers did not have to provide medically accurate information--leaving centers to share misleading and false information without regulation.