Low-income women are hurt the most by the abortion ban wave

In 1973, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade was decided, protecting a pregnant woman’s choice to have an abortion. Over the past few weeks, women in the U.S. have come to question if that decision is under threat as a number of states passed incredibly restrictive abortion laws.

These bans restrict access to abortion in nearly all circumstances, including rape and incest, and only offer an exception when a woman's health is at serious risk. Politicians behind the bans across the country have made it clear that their goal in passing these laws is to ultimately prompt a Supreme Court challenge to one of them in the hopes of ultimately overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Watching these developments unfold from Sri Lanka, which has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world, has been eye-opening. These United States bans propose even more intense punishment than those that currently exist in Sri Lanka. For example, Alabama’s bill would make performing an abortion at any stage of pregnancy a felony punishable by up to 99 years in prison. In Sri Lanka, the punishment for all abortion procedures that are “not caused in good faith for the purpose of saving the life of the woman” is up to seven years and/or a fine, according to Section 303 of the nation’s penal code.

Of course, Sri Lankan women still obtain abortions for reasons other than their lives being at risk, which is the only legal exception in the country. In fact, the Ministry of Health reported in 2016 that 658 abortions are carried out daily. Research carried out in two abortion clinics in Colombo in 1997 showed that more than 90 percent of patients were married women, and more than half of them already had one or two children. One of the primary reasons given by married women for why they were seeking an abortion was poverty.

Undoubtedly, American women would follow in the same path and still attempt to access abortion even if Roe v. Wade is ultimately overturned. This reality begs the question: If women are going to seek abortion no matter the legal status of abortion in the country they live in, who will illegal abortion hurt the most? The answer can be found in examining how significant a role class plays in a woman’s decision to have an abortion.

Class impacts every decision a woman makes about her body from the second she finds out she’s pregnant. Imagine that you are a 35-year-old mother of two living as one of the urban poor in low-cost housing. Whether you live in Sri Lanka, the United States, or anywhere else under these circumstances, you are struggling to make ends meet. It’s very likely that you work in the informal economy, and therefore lack access to paid maternity leave and/or flexible work hours. Having another child would mean that you would potentially need to stay home for months without an income to care for a newborn. This is not an option for many women whose families cannot survive without their additional income and for whom child care is not an affordable option. Of course, this decision may also be further complicated later in a woman’s pregnancy if it is found the child will be born with significant fetal abnormalities or disabilities and therefore require sustained full-time care which the families cannot afford to give.

This experience is compounded in difficulty if abortion is illegal. Women with a substantial income can afford to travel to places where abortion is legal and thus infinitely safer. Some can even find providers in their own communities who will perform the procedure for a substantial fee. Impoverished women don’t have these options, and so are forced to seek out unsafe clinics, which can result in medical complications, or resort to dangerous home remedies that can include everything from papaya leaves to bicycle spokes. When done following a proper medical procedure, surgical abortion is a completely safe medical procedure. It’s only unsafe when the procedure is illegal and therefore unregulated — and low-income women are the most likely people to be subjected to those kinds of procedures.

Low-income women who determine that the risks are too great to pursue an abortion are the women truly left without the right to choose. Evidence shows that a woman’s socioeconomic success is intrinsically tied to their reproductive lives — even among more privileged women who see their career trajectories tied to their child-bearing. Studies show that forcing women to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term quadruples their odds of living below the poverty line, and laws that restrict abortion access have proven to deteriorate economic outcomes for women. This is to say nothing of the negative impact on the health, opportunities, and emotional well-being of the children born into these situations.

We need to ask ourselves if we are having the right conversation about abortion. Are we placing the realities of women and their children at the forefront of our conversations, or are concerns over a debatable and relatively abstract sense of morality more important than their lives?