When I was asked to write an article on the restrictions that some states sought to impose on abortion access during the Covid-19 pandemic, my initial thought was that the topic would probably be stale before I finished writing the piece. The worry was misplaced. On the one hand, all the restrictions put in place shortly after the pandemic began either expired or were defeated before the summer of 2020—long before the publication of this article. But attempts to restrict access to abortion in the United States are evergreen. The topic is continually relevant.
Some legislators use nearly any event as an excuse or vehicle for abortion restrictions. Is there a bill to address police brutality? Try to append abortion restrictions to it. A bill to cut access to health insurance and block-grant Medicaid? Include abortion restrictions.
One cannot blame them for trying. After all, crises, with their unsettling of the usual order of things, provide fruitful opportunities to advance any number of causes, no matter how tenuous their relation might be to the crisis in question. But this begs the question: what is it about abortion that precipitates such a reflexive reaction from some legislators? What is it that makes a governor assert that the “[g]overnment’s role should be to protect life from the beginning to the end,” when signing legislation banning abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected? It is not about saving children or improving their lives. If it were, the same politicians fighting to end abortion would also be vociferously fighting for clean air and environmental standards, reliable financial support for families in need, paid and temporally generous parental leave, universal early childhood programs, improved and enriched public school education, and free or reduced-cost public post-secondary and vocational education, among other matters. Many such legislators, however, are opposed to these sorts of programs, or at least to increasing their funding and scope.
For these legislators, it’s not the fetuses that are important, but rather the prohibition of abortion itself and what that entails for those who may need one. Healthcare delivery problems in the context of Covid-19 provided a similar wedge for anti-abortion legislators and governors. Politicians used concern about preserving personal protective equipment (PPE) and protecting both health care providers and patients to seek to restrict or, in some cases, nearly eliminate access to many or most abortions.
This article will discuss how these politicians sought to accomplish these ends. It will examine the arguments that they and their amici made to support their policy choices, and will detail the implications of those policies on the patients seeking abortions, their health care providers, their fetuses, and their loved ones in the context of the pandemic. It will argue that the implications of these policies strongly suggest that the restrictions had nothing to do with protecting the lives of unborn children, the health of the people involved, or scarce PPE. Rather, the restrictions are intended to help subordinate women by taking away some of the hard-won control that people with uteruses have over their biology. The juxtaposition of these restrictions against our society’s fierce fight against the pandemic makes the disparities in how we treat certain biological problems rather stark. The time is ripe for a re-evaluation of when, if ever, it may be reasonable for a state to restrict the right to an abortion.