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By Kirsten Engel, former state senator and a candidate for Arizona’s 6th Congressional District. For more info visit Engel for Arizona.
Last week, the Arizona State House voted along party lines to end the freedom of Arizonans to choose an abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. All that now stands in the way of this law going into effect is an extremely unlikely veto from Gov. Doug Ducey and the U.S. Supreme Court’s even more unlikely reversal of a similar Mississippi restriction as a violation of Roe v. Wade.
As a teacher of young adults, as an Arizona legislator who served for five years on behalf of constituents who elected me to stand up for their health-care rights, and above all, as a mom who has chosen to raise a family, I am outraged by this assault on my daughter’s generation and their dreams for their future.
Already our generation’s lack of action on climate change and voting rights is adding anxiety and uncertainty to their lives. Must we also deprive them of their very rights to their own health-care choices, sentencing even those who are victims of rape or incest to bring a risky or unwanted pregnancy to term? And let’s not forget the ban will disproportionately upend the lives of the most vulnerable in our community; low-income people of color who lack adequate health care or who cannot afford to travel out of state to receive a legal abortion in a neighboring state like Nevada or California.
But it’s also wrong to think that this debate is just about abortion and that only those seeking an abortion are impacted. This will affect all Americans.
Fundamental right to privacy
The high court’s much-anticipated reversal of Roe is just the tip of the iceberg of a decades-long concerted effort by political conservatives to read out of the Constitution any protection for rights not explicitly spelled out in the Constitution.
After all, Roe is built on a foundation, the idea that all Americans enjoy a fundamental right to privacy that protects them from unwelcome government intrusion into their private lives and personal choices. A woman’s right to choose abortion if she wants it is just one of those rights.
If this Roe-guaranteed right falls, a whole host of implied Constitutional rights that we take for granted will no longer be safe either. This includes the right to have children in the first place, the right to choose to avoid having children by using contraceptives, the freedom to have the personal relationships we choose and to marry whom we love, and the right to raise our children as we see fit.
Already a sitting U.S. senator, Mike Braun, R-Ind., suggested, before walking it back, that if the court abandons the privacy right undergirding Roe, states should once again be able to decide on their own, without interference from the court, whether to prohibit interracial marriages or outlaw contraception. As Braun put it, “If you are not wanting the Supreme Court to weigh in on issues like that, you are not going to be able to have your cake and eat it too.”
I would expect Arizona would continue to guarantee these fundamental individual freedoms even without the Supreme Court’s constitutional backstop, but I had also thought the state would safeguard the reproductive health care rights of my daughter’s generation. Now I’m not so sure.
It is time the U.S. Congress stepped in to guarantee the Constitutional rights and freedoms that Arizona and at least twenty-five other states are taking away and that the Supreme Court is poised to abandon.
It can start, whatever the Supreme Court does this term, by passing legislation guaranteeing by statute the half-century-old Constitutional right: the fundamental freedom of all to choose, when they decide that it is right for them, to safely and legally end a risky or unwanted pregnancy.
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