We can protect women’s reproductive rights

As we recently wrote in a letter to The New York Times, we are women who came of age before Roe v. Wade. Many of us had illegal abortions. We are the lucky ones who survived. Thousands didn’t. The process was fraught with committing illegal acts and being compelled to have blind faith in practitioners who had dubious medical credentials.

We are outraged and appalled and afraid for women generations younger than we are because of the passage of SB 8 in Texas and the hundreds of abortion restrictions that have passed across the United States.

We know how fearful the specter of back-street abortions can be, and that is exactly what some states are legislating. But we know that women will always, for one reason or another, seek to determine their own — and their family’s — destiny.  Tompkins County’s own Assemblymember Connie Cook said in 1970 that women will choose to have an abortion no matter the law. She went on to lead the New York State legislation to remove criminality from the state’s abortion laws.

Women in New York are fortunate that in 2019, their state Legislature legalized the protections of Roe v. Wade through the Reproductive Health Act. Gov. Kathy Hochul has spoken directly to the need to strengthen New York as a safe harbor for all seeking abortion care.

Increasingly conservative states, however, do not have those same safeguards. Rather, their lawmakers are seeking ways to further restrict women in their states from access to abortion services. That likely means families seeking abortions will be coming to New York from elsewhere in the country.  In fact, our local Planned Parenthood has seen such a pattern.

We now see in the current political climate that legislation is a surer protection than judicial rulings. Here are three things that you can do to help abortion access for women across this country.

1. The New York State Assembly recently passed two bills — A8286 and A7573 — to further strengthen the 2019 legislation. These bills have yet to pass the New York State Senate.  Assemblywoman Anna Kelles talked about these bills at the Oct. 2 Women’s Rally at Cornell University. We join her in urging everyone concerned with ensuring safe and legal access to every woman’s reproductive health care to contact members of the New York State Senate to urge our state senators to join the majority of the Assembly in passing these new bills.

2. On the national level, the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2021, similar to New York’s, is still pending passage in the U.S. Senate. We urge each reader to write Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer to vote in favor of this urgently needed legislation.

3. Finally, we ask that each of you speak up to as many audiences as you can find to protest the outrageous Texas law, SB 8, a direct attack against women and against women’s constitutional rights. The bill bans abortion at six weeks, which is before most women know they may be pregnant. Additionally, the law contains no exceptions for pregnancies that result from rape, sexual abuse, incest or for pregnancies involving a fetal defect incompatible with life after birth.

With the shadowed support of a majority of Supreme Court justices, the legal maneuvering in Texas has shoved American women’s constitutionally affirmed reproductive protections into a dark corner. The Texas law further authorizes unlicensed citizens to act as the enforcers, essentially vigilantes, of the law’s provisions.

Join us and speak up now!

This statement is from Joan Adler, Caroline Cox, Linda Hoffmann, Carol Kammen, Nancy Miller and Sue Perlgut, members of End Abortion Stigma (EAS). EAS is a group of local women who have lived in the Ithaca area for several decades. They came together in 2015 to tell their stories of illegal abortions before the security of Roe v. Wade and in response to the increasing restrictions on access to safe and legal abortions.

EAS members have held abortion speak-outs with campus communities, distributed fact sheets throughout the community about the safety of abortions, joined rallies, appeared on national television, produced a video about their experiences and continue to speak out for reproductive justice by writing letters and opinion pieces.