The cries of alarm have multiplied since the Supreme Court of the United States plans to reconsider the right of women to have an abortion. “Women will die” if it ends the right to abortion, alarms the prestigious medical journal The Lancet this Friday in an editorial, believing that the judges will then have “blood on their hands”.
At the beginning of May, the preliminary draft of a majority decision written by the conservative judge Samuel Alito leaked in the press, calling into question the judgment “Roe versus Wade” of 1973, which guarantees women access to abortion , even in the most conservative states.
“Women’s blood on their hands”
“The fact is that if the Supreme Court of the United States upholds this draft, women will die,” writes The Lancet in its editorial, published on its website. “Alito and his allies will have the blood of women on their hands.”
“In the United States, black women have an unintended pregnancy rate that is twice that of non-Hispanic white women. And the maternal mortality rate for black women, for which unsafe abortions are a significant factor, is nearly three times that of white women,” the prestigious journal continued.
“It’s going to be awful”
“What kind of society has the United States become when a small group of judges are allowed to hurt women, families and their communities, even though they were elected to protect them? », asks the editorial again.
Last survivor of the legal battle which established the constitutional right to abortion in the United States, Linda Coffee shares the indignation of the newspaper. “It’s going to be horrible,” predicted the 79-year-old lady, who at the time represented Jane Roe, a pregnant woman wishing to have a voluntary termination of pregnancy (IVG).
Thousands of miles to abort
Abortion “will be very expensive for poor people… A lot of people can’t afford to fly,” she explained while receiving AFP in her Texas home, sitting in a wheelchair.
Indeed, if the Supreme Court reverses its emblematic decision of 1973, millions of American women could find themselves hundreds or even thousands of kilometers from the nearest medical center performing abortions. Especially those living in Florida, South Texas or Mississippi.
The majority of Americans support the right to abortion
“A very large majority of people want to keep part of the Roe versus Wade decision,” continues Linda Coffee. It is only a “minority, very noisy, who does not want to keep anything”. According to a May 2021 study by the Pew Research Institute, 59% of Americans believe that abortion should remain legal in all cases or in a majority of them.
In the leaked draft that was published by the news site Politico, Samuel Alito writes: “We estimate that Roe v. Wade must be annulled” and the right to abortion “is not protected by any provision of the Constitution”. If this conclusion is accepted by the Court, the United States will return to the situation before 1973 when each state was free to prohibit or authorize abortion. Twenty-six American states “will certainly or probably prohibit abortion” according to the Guttmacher research institute, favorable to the right to abortion and whose studies refer.