By Maya Harrington
In March 2024, France became the first country in the world to enshrine the right to abortion in their constitution, nearly 50 years after legalizing it in 1975.
With the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade — the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case that had previously encoded the right to abortion — the United States has gone in a very different direction. Forty-nine years after the initial legalization of abortion in France, it has now become a constitutional right; 49 years after the initial legalization of abortion in the United States, it is now restricted or altogether banned in 21 states.
“By taking away constitutional protection for abortion, Dobbs leaves states considerable discretion to restrict or ban abortions,” said Dr. Elizabeth Weeks, the associate provost for faculty affairs at University of Georgia’s School of Law. “A dozen or more states already have enacted laws allowing abortions only in very narrow circumstances and/or criminalizing abortions or assisting with abortions.”
Georgia is one of those states with abortion being illegal once a heartbeat is detectable, typically around the fifth or sixth week of pregnancy.
Precedence for this was first established in 2019 by Governor Bryan Kemp’s “heartbeat” law, a trigger law that was passed three years wbefore the Dobbs decision. However, the law did not go into effect immediately, as a federal district court passed an injunction which prevented the ban from taking effect, and a district court officially found it unconstitutional in July 2020 — a decision intended to be permanent. Several nearby states, including Alabama and Louisiana, had attempted to enact similar laws prior to the Dobbs decision, with varying success. However, it was not until about a month after the Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs that the sixweek ban went into effect.
In most of Georgia, obtaining an abortion beyond six weeks is a criminal action with a sentence of 1-10 years in prison. In only two cities in the entire state — Atlanta and Savannah — has abortion past six weeks been decriminalized.
49 years after the initial legalization of abortion in the United States, it is now restricted or altogether banned in 21 states.
Weeks said, “From a public health perspective, I see long-term implications of limiting women’s choices [of] whether to continue a pregnancy, even of a healthy child — impairing [their] ability to finish school or obtain additional training, remain[ing] employed or obtain[ing] employment, support[ing] themselves financially. That then has implications for society, productivity, and the economy.”
Restricting access to abortion limits participation in the workforce and impedes on the impacted person’s ability to finish school, especially if they are still enrolled in high school or above. The stress it can place on the economic situation of an individual can be and often is astronomical. According to Weeks, someone who is denied an abortion is more than four times as likely to live in poverty for years afterwards.
“Women who have fewer resources and socioeconomic means/support will face greater impacts. They would be less likely to have the option to travel to another state to obtain a legal abortion or access other medical care or advocate for their health care needs. The impacts on educational and occupational choice seem great. For women who already have a child or other family care responsibilities, it may be even harder to navigate the remaining options for access to legal abortion, which could place them in a state of long-term dependency on public benefits if they cannot pursue education or employment,” said Weeks.
In Georgia, more than 630,000 women live in what are known as “contraceptive deserts,” which are counties that have a lack of access to the full range of contraceptive methods. Of them, almost 45,000 live in counties without a single health center that provides the full range of contraceptive services, from pap smears to birth control.
This problem has been worsened by the abortion ban and the shuttering of abortion clinics around the state. Essentially all health centers that provided abortions — the number of which had fallen drastically in the years and decades prior to Dobbs — also provided a wide range of contraceptive services. These services are often not covered by the “crisis pregnancy centers” that exist around the state, worsening the problem of contraceptive deserts and making it increasingly difficult to access these kinds of preventive care.
Lack of access and criminalization of abortion could also set a precedent for other restrictions on people’s reproductive rights and freedoms. The most recent example of this is the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that all embryos created via in-vitro fertilization (IVF) are children, including those that do not get implanted into a uterus and remain frozen, to which the state law concerning wrongful death of a minor can now be applied. This could have sweeping effects that reverberate throughout the country, especially states with reproductive rights laws similar to those of Alabama.
The conversation about abortion laws and reproductive healthcare accessibility remains a particularly contentious topic, both in Georgia and across the United States. Advocates on both sides of the issue seek to educate others about their cause. As the debate continues on, finding common ground is integral to paving the path forward.
