Your Body is a Battleground // Part Three: Reproductive healthcare protects women

Editor’s note: This article is the third in a series about attempts to restrict access to birth control, both in Oklahoma and across the nation. The series will also look at our country’s fragile legal justification for contraceptive access, the historical oppression of women, the health risks associated with pregnancy and childbirth, and what could be in store for reproductive healthcare access if we stay on the current political course.

September 19, 2024

While politicians haggle over when and where women may access reproductive healthcare, perhaps it’s more constructive to examine why contraception—and the broader role that reproductive healthcare plays—is so important. “The power to make and act on decisions about reproduction—is central to how people shape their lives,” states the Center for Reproductive Rights in its report, The Constitutional Right to Reproductive Autonomy: Realizing the Promize of the 14th Amendment. “This requires that the government respect, protect, and fulfill reproductive autonomy rights.”

When it comes to health, abortion abolitionists choose the wellbeing of the unborn fetus over that of the mother. This fact has been illustrated across the nation, including Oklahoma, where the state’s supreme court ruled in 2023 that two laws passed by the Legislature and signed by Governor Kevin Stitt were invalid because they violated Article II, Section 2 of the Oklahoma Constitution, which says “all persons have the inherent right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the enjoyment of the gains of their own industry.”

“We would define this inherent right to mean: a woman has an inherent right to choose to terminate her pregnancy if at any point in the pregnancy, the woman’s physician has determined to a reasonable degree of medical certainty or probability that the continuation of the pregnancy will endanger the woman’s life due to the pregnancy itself or due to a medical condition that the woman is either currently suffering from or likely to suffer from during the pregnancy,” the Oklahoma Supreme Court stated its ruling in Oklahoma Call for Reproductive Justice v. Drummond.

In a separate concurring opinion, Justice Yvonne Kauger went a step further, writing that a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy to preserve her life existed even at times in history when women had very little body autonomy. “Women have had to deal with the threat of legally and socially condoned discrimination and physical violence visited against them for centuries,” Kauger wrote. “Despite the scriptural admonition that husbands love their wives as their own bodies, corporal discipline was permitted by law, and the emphasis was on submission of a wife to the husband.”

Women have long faced adversity when making decisions about how to live their lives, Kauger wrote, and the government often sought to make those decisions for them. In early American history, wives were not allowed to own property. After the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, giving women the right to vote, Oklahoma waited until 1951 to allow women to serve on juries. Until the 1970s, married women were required to have their husbands cosign on credit card applications. In 2021, the average woman employed full-time was paid on average eighty-two percent of the typical man’s pay.

Historically, state and federal governments have perpetuated the stereotype that a woman’s primary role should be as wife and mother. Vulnerable populations—the poor, immigrants, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people—tend to have even less autonomy over their bodies due to systemic bias and discrimination.

While these ideas of inequality sound archaic, newly anointed vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance of Ohio has criticized people who don’t have children. As first reported by HuffPost, Vance said in a 2021 interview with The Federalist that “we have to go to war against the anti-child ideology that exists in our country.” Vance was quoted in the same article calling people who advocate for women to focus on their careers over having children “pathetic.”

Pregnancy and childbirth carry health risks

Pregnancy and childbirth can have dramatic health implications for mothers. Oklahoma’s maternal death rate between 2019-2021 was thirty-one deaths per 100,000 live births, an increase from 25.2 from 2018-2020, according to the Oklahoma State Department of Health, who attributed the rise to COVID-19. Oklahoma also had the nation’s third highest uninsured rate among its nonelderly population at 16.1 percent in 2021, and 14.3 percent of Oklahoma women between the ages eighteen to forty-four reported their health status as fair or poor in 2021, according to the Oklahoma Maternal Health Task Force’s 2023 annual report. Cases of severe maternal morbidity, defined as “severe complications during labor and delivery,” have also risen.

Oklahoma’s rates of both maternal death and severe maternal morbidity are higher among Black and Indigenous populations. “Compared with live births, maternal mortality disproportionately affected Non-Hispanic Black mothers, Non-Hispanic American Indian/Alaska Native mothers, mothers 35 years of age or older, and mothers who received a high school education or less,” the report states. Again, pregnancy and childbirth are more dangerous for the poor, less educated, and persons of color than the rest of population. Access to contraception mitigates those risks.

One Oklahoman, Jaci Statton, told NPR in 2023 that she was told by the staff at one state hospital to "sit in the parking lot" until her non-viable pregnancy became more-life threatening before she could receive care. Her husband ended up driving Statton to Kansas to receive a surgical abortion that saved her life. She later filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, which was denied, according to the Associated Press.

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