This doesn’t happen in Portugal | Opinion
On May 3, a document from the US Supreme Court confirmed what many suspected – the intention of most judges to vote to revoke Roe v Wade, the precedent for the legality of federal abortion in the US for nearly 50 years.
For many, like Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, this is the culmination of the conservative move in the Republican Party to set an agenda through control of this body. The most recent cases were an accused of sexual harassment Kawasaki, during his confirmation during the Senate, as well as the official confirmation of Amy Comey Bar, in a few months of the November 2020 election, breaking not only the tradition of not appointing judges. in a pre-election period, but also showing a deep disregard for the last wish of the late judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Trump’s own election in 2016 and his support for the Republican Party owed much to this commitment to the names of both Court judges and in both conservative instances in the Supreme Court.
So what are the consequences of this decision?
Many that, since abortion is legal at the federal level, are decreed and people with a uterus will have the possibility of women recurring to this procedure in which there is no freedom of a margin of autonomy, even if the choice does not remain legal. Now this kind of ignorant view of what profound inequities in the American system are and demonstrates an ignorance of a way in which termination of pregnancy works even today in the US. States are still currently free from certain abortion rules, such as the potential wait time between the appointment and the procedure or the number of weeks between which an abortion can be performed. The conservative movement also replicates itself in the well-known “crisis pregnancy centers”, the financial organizations by the State aim to manipulate the choices of pregnant people to prevent abortion, often resorting to deliberately manipulative information and absurd tactics such as the presentation of unsolicited phone calls with emotional messages to the mother. These measures, and particularly the repeal of Roe v Wade, not surprisingly by ability, will lessen the impact of African-American people and will not have the information on where and how they will go to a neighbor to have an abortion.
More than anything, the main consequence of this measure is, once again, the misogyny directed at women, taking away their autonomy over their own bodies, and submitting them to patriarchal values, to an essentialist vision of women that reduces their ability to reproduction .
In Portugal, too, the struggle for the emancipation of women’s bodies has been contentious. In 2007, our President of the Republic Marcelo Reabelo de Sousa led the campaign against the legalization of early retirement from pregnancy, after a referendum on the matter had been called. According to Marcelo, who at the time took up a platform as a weekly commentator in prime time, the woman had to base herself on the reasoning before being able to have an abortion. I remind you that the question was whether to decriminalize your pregnancy initiative.
The referendum in Portugal, fortunately, won with 59%, but the fight against the policing of women’s bodies has not yet been fully achieved. The lack of a feminist perspective in the formulation of public policies is nothing more than the possibility of expanding the evident family that has to undergo IVG, ignoring that abortion is an intelligently known part of the family, that the burden of pregnancy is not limited to the woman (who, in most cases, is a single person in a relationship who uses contraceptives and which, unfortunately, are not infallible), and that this type of indicators will lead to an increase in the number of Reluctant types of basic medical health care ( and here I am not referring only to abortion, possibly this type can be penalized if they test positive for the sexes, which is also your halfway to leave this type of communicable diseases under study and increase their transmissibility).
We continue to ten weeks just for an abortion to occur in Portugal, compared to the averages of 16-20 weeks, to be treated with an unacceptable paternity with the next of a reflection period of days, and the terms of reflection we come across with professionals that can offer a basic right through conscientious objection and be judged on our personal choices in a context that should be safe for everyone.
If this struggle and the US is not something relevant that progress and human rights is constant and case, unfortunately, will never be a given. Then continue the democratic struggle, to fulfill the social contract and demand that there is no true freedom until the rights of all and all of them allow it.
The author writes according to the new orthographic agreement