Anita Anand | Overturning Roe: It’s overzealous morality at play vs sexual pleasure

On June 24 this year, the US Supreme Court overruled its landmark 1973 Roe vs Wade ruling in the Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organisation case on the grounds that the right to abortion was not “deeply rooted in this nation’s history or tradition”, and not considered a right when the “due process clause” was ratified in 1868, and was unknown in US law until Roe.

Almost 50 years ago, the Supreme Court delivered its landmark order in 1973, ruling that the United States Constitution generally protects the liberty of women to choose to have an abortion. This decision struck down federal and state abortion laws and was the beginning of an ongoing debate on the extent, legality and role of moral and religious views in political spheres.

Abortion has long been a contentious issue in the US, sharply dividing Americans along partisan, ideological and religious lines. A 2022 Pew Research Centre survey found that 61 per cent of US adults say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 37 per cent think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. Additionally, there is intense disagreement between, and within, political parties over abortion, and the partisan divide on abortion is wider than it was two decades ago.

The religious right and pro-lifers, as anti-abortionists call themselves, have worked deftly and strategically over the last four decades to get pro-life candidates into public office, both at the state and federal levels. This has influenced the court’s June decision.

Pope Francis, one of the most progressive leaders the Catholic Church has ever had, said during a 2020 visit to France that sex and food are “simply divine” pleasures that arrive “directly from God”. He condemned the Church’s past views on simple pleasures of food and sex, calling them “overzealous morality” that has “caused enormous harm, which can be felt strongly till today”. His focus on sex for pleasure was noteworthy, as it differed from the Vatican’s staunch insistence on sex for procreation, and an institutional condemnation of birth control and abortion.

If sex is not merely for procreation, can pleasure and sexual desire feature in the abortion debate? It could, but it has not and does not. And it underlies the pro-lifers’ opposition to abortion.

American sociologist Randall Collins argues that human sexuality can be fully understood only in a social context. Human beings, fundamentally, are distinctly, spectacularly social. Lonely and isolated, we can’t survive, let alone thrive. For us, power and meaning emerge through making connections. Sexual desire, thus, is not chiefly for physical pleasure or procreation, but to connect with others. Sexual pleasure is thus basically a social construct, an emergent property of social exchange.

Women have been discouraged and prohibited from feeling sexual desire and seeking and experiencing sexual pleasure as they need to be seen as wives and mothers, without any sexual identity of their own. Pregnancy means sexual activity, and if outside marriage, women must experience shame and guilt. Women therefore seek sexual pleasure at great risk to themselves.

Risks that men do not face.

According to pro-lifers, if a woman is pregnant and wants to terminate the pregnancy, opting for an abortion, it should not be available to her, despite her decision, due to any reason. She must be punished for giving into sexual desire and seeking pleasure. If she is raped, she asked for it. Making abortion unavailable, withdrawing it, or criminalising it, in the United States, or any country, perpetuates violence towards women, especially in cases of rape.

Medical technology offers women options to prevent pregnancy and for unplanned sex or failed contraception. Birth control methods and over the counter morning-after pills, abortion pills are available. But abortion must be available as a backup, should these options fail. And fail they do.

In the US, while it may not be a constitutional right (the Constitution did not specifically acknowledge women back in 1787-88 when it was written, signed and ratified, and lawmakers failed women in not passing the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. But it’s surely a human right that women be given a choice over their bodies and medical assistance, should they choose to terminate their pregnancies.

Debates on whether the foetus is a person or not and at what stage are smokescreens and whataboutery. Medical facts won’t change people’s minds, whether they support or don’t support abortion. These are emotive issues, based on notions of right and wrong and morality.

As Pope Frances says: overzealous morality.

Denying women a sexual life of their choosing makes for an unhappy and unhealthy society. Raising unwanted children, to single women or couples, increases financial and social anxiety. Insisting that sex occur in marriage or for procreation is against current trends in the US. In 2020, nearly four out of 10 adults between the age of 25 and 54 were neither married nor living with a partner, according to a Pew Research Centre study. The number of single-person households doubled from 18.2 million in 1980 to 36.1 million, or about 28 per cent of the nation’s total. An additional 11 million homes are headed by a single parent, triple the number in 1965.

Behavioural economist Peter McGraw believes this is probably because of the rise of women’s educational and economic status. The ability to survive and thrive economically means that getting married and having children is an option, not the default.

Since sexual pleasure is not dying out anytime soon, choosing to carry a pregnancy to term or terminating it must both be safe and viable options for women.