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Human rights are at stake in the US elections next week.
We’ve already discussed here in the Daily Brief how US voters should be guided by thinking about their own family’s past and considering their own family’s future. We’ve also looked at serious threats to the democratic process itself in the US.
Today, we’re going to get more specific and look at one key question in these elections: do you have the right to decide what happens to your own body? Or should the government control your body, making medical decisions for you?
Wait, what kind of question even is that? Of course, you have a right to your own body. If you don’t have that right, what rights do you have? It’s your body. The government should butt out.
And yet, this is essentially the question being put to voters in ballot initiatives in ten different US states in these elections. Millions of people will be asked to defend this basic right, bodily autonomy.
The US has been sliding backwards on this issue for years, particularly since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion. Thirteen US states now ban abortion completely, and many others have harshly restricted access.
And wherever the government has been ordering people what to do with their bodies, the impacts on health and lives have been devastating. The horror stories keep piling up. Last month, for example, ProPublica reported two women had died due to the abortion ban in the US state of Georgia.
Just yesterday, it was reported a woman died in Texas after being told it would be a crime for doctors to hurry her miscarriage in progress. The medical team apparently said they couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped. She suffered through 40 hours of trauma and died of infection three days later, leaving her husband a widower and four-year-old daughter without a mother.
Laws written by politicians willfully ignorant of human biology are leaving medical professionals unable to – or afraid to – provide care that’s needed. Those politicians have put the government in control of our bodies, completely at odds with our fundamental rights.
In the abortion-related measures on the ballot in ten US states, most would enshrine abortion rights in state constitutions. Some ballot measures would expand abortion access in states where it is restricted. Other measures would safeguard abortion in states where it is already accessible.
Taken together, most of these state ballot measures would help restore abortion access for tens of millions of people.
Voters in these states are being asked to defend a basic right – bodily autonomy. They shouldn’t have to, of course. A fundamental right like this should be unquestionable.
And yet, here we are, in 2024, still having to fight the government for control of our own bodies.
