A woman’s body is not her own in much of today’s world

The United Nations Population Fund’s State of World Population report, 2021, for the first time, focused on the issue of women’s bodily autonomy. At this juncture, many pro-choice activists are apprehensive about the possibility of the SC’s present conservative majority endorsing the legality of the Mississippi law, or perhaps even going further by overturning its 1973 landmark ruling in the Roe vs. Wade case, which legalized abortion nationwide and proclaimed that the “decision whether to continue a pregnancy or have an abortion, that impacts a person’s body, health, family and future, belongs to the individual, not the government”. In its brief to the SC, Mississippi’s attorney general argued for revoking the Roe vs Wade ruling and a subsequent 1992 decision that affirmed it, calling both “egregiously wrong… unprincipled decisions… that have poisoned the national discourse, and plagued the law”, and asked for state legislatures to be given greater power to “restrict abortions”. In this context, Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, an advocacy group that is among those challenging the Mississippi law, expressed deep concern that “if Roe falls, the impact will be immediate and far-reaching, well beyond Mississippi, since half the States in the country are ready to ban abortion entirely… endangering the lives of women of child-bearing age, who have never known a world in which they don’t have this basic right”. The US House of Representatives has also introduced a bill, named Women’s Health Protection Act, to establish a statutory right to receive abortion care and codify the Roe vs Wade decisions.