Women's Rights, Abortion Take Centre Stage In 2024 US Elections

In Mrs. America, a mini-series documentary from 2020, a group of actors come together to recreate the debates and discussions around the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the US. As the deadline looms for its ratification, the debate is hotting up, with women from across the country pushing for the required number of states—38, a two-third majority, the figure needed for the ERA to be written into the Constitution—as well as the Opposition, often made up of conservative women.

In the end, feminists do not win the battle, and the deadline expires (subsequently, in real life, the battle did get ‘won’ later and 38 states signed, making the era part of the American constitution, but the documentary ends before that time), and there is despair and defeat among the feminists.

This happens in the early 1970s, and the extended deadline for the ratification takes us to the early 1980s. This is a time when women’s issues are predominant on the international horizon—countries are preparing shadow reports to be presented to the United Nations, International Year of Women is being planned, major conferences are in the offing and feminist movements across the world are coming into their own.

But in the US, the country that is seen, and indeed that sees itself, as the epitome of ‘development’ and freedom, many states are still not willing to sign a simple statement that speaks of women’s equality.

In India, these were the years of the Emergency, a time when the women’s movement began to come into its own, and India produced what is now seen as a landmark document that acts as one of the catalysts for the women’s movement, Towards Equality: The Report of the Committee on the Status of Women (1974-75). There were signs that change was on its way and that the gains women were making internationally and in their own contexts would not be reversed.

Cut to 2024, half a century later: the US elections are just round the corner and one of the two key issues in this debate is the right to abortion. Following the 2022 controversial ruling in the Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization—that overturned the landmark Roe vs Wade (1973) judgement that made abortion freely available for American women—we now have a judgement that has widely rendered it unavailable. The reversal that women thought was a thing of the past has actually happened.

And the man who engineered that particular ruling—Donald Trump—by appointing three conservative judges may become the president, once again. In fact, he has no hesitation in saying that he will ensure that abortion remains unavailable because, in his thinking, it is the way to ‘protect’ women. Clearly, when the chips are down, the deep conservativeness of American society shows its ugly head.

And when the chips are further down, the success that many western societies claim, in having separated religion from the State, is shown up to be a hollow claim. For the Opposition, abortion is deeply rooted in their religious belief: the child, or life, is god given and humans don’t have the right to tamper with it.

Meanwhile, women’s lives are being lost. Healthcare related to women’s reproductive needs is beginning to become more and more difficult to access as doctors in the US have become more fearful of treating women.

This isn’t about which country is better or worse though.

India’s record on abortion has not been as contentious as that of the US, but it hasn’t been entirely positive either. Roughly at the time the debates were going on about the ERA in America, the Indian State legalised abortion in 1971. But there were many ‘buts’—the State was not acting out of a belief that women should have autonomy over their bodies. Rather, abortion was brought in as one of the many family planning measures and it remained difficult for women to access: moral censure, intimidating documents, judgemental doctors, no back-up systems—all these played a major role in keeping backstreet abortions going even when women theoretically had free access.

There were times when things looked as if they may improve. In particular, a recent amendment (2021), followed by a case in 2022, X vs Principal Secretary, where the courts granted a petitioner the right to terminate her 22-week pregnancy, was seen as positive by reproductive rights groups. The judgement in the X vs Principal Secretary established that a woman’s decision to carry her pregnancy to term or to terminate it is rooted in her right to bodily autonomy.

Sadly, this advantage was lost a year later when the courts refused to allow women with postpartum psychosis to abort her foetus at 24 weeks, effectively saying that after that temporal limit, she had no right to her own body and it was up to the courts to decide.

This is why Kamala Harris’ singular focus on abortion and women’s right to choose what to do with their bodies is both important and difficult. It is important because no one, other than women themselves, can claim the right to their bodies. Only they have the right to decide what to do with their bodies. Difficult because, as polls show, while 61 per cent of people in the US do not approve the reversal of Roe vs Wade, there are still a large number who do, and many states have quickly instituted bans.

The battle over women’s bodies is not new; the tragedy is that it is still around, alive and kicking. Our own history provides ample examples. During the violence of the Partition of India in 1947, nearly a hundred thousand women were believed to have been abducted, large numbers of them raped. Many became pregnant, and it is widely believed that the State sponsored mass abortions (known, euphemistically, as safaya, cleansing) in private hospitals at a time when abortion was illegal. It is pointless to ask if women were ever consulted in this.

The concern with ‘clean’ and ‘pure’ women’s bodies extended further. As is well-known by now, once it became clear that thousands of women had been abducted, the Indian and Pakistani states, who were fighting over every small thing, came together within weeks (in September of 1947) to discuss the fate of women. And together they decided that the abducted women had to be found, and to be ‘recovered’.

But the tricky question remained: these women were now ‘impure’; they’d been in sexual relationships with men of the other religion. How could this be reversed? Very likely the women’s families would not take them back if they had been rendered thus impure. And so it was that Mahatma Gandhi and other leaders who did their best to establish that abducted women were not impure, that the fact that their bodies had been used by men of the ‘other’ religion should not go against them as that was not the woman’s fault.

In subsequent wars and battles across the world, this trope has been played and replayed, with women’s bodies becoming battlegrounds for battles that are largely created by men, and then men deciding how to restore ‘legitimacy’ to the women. It also gets played out in the increasing numbers of what are mistakenly called ‘honour’ killings, where women are killed for any transgression—whether it relates to caste or religion or love or sex. In each case, the ‘impure’ body is then destroyed, and the destroyer is valorised or given impunity by society.

It isn’t only in wars that this largely male concern raises its head. In the last few years, young women in Pakistan, taking out protest marches on International Women’s Day, raised a slogan, mera jism, meri marzi (my body, my choice). It raised a storm of opposition, largely among men, but also among women. The general feeling was: how dare women say this?

What if we were to try to imagine the opposite? What if the march had been led by young men, and they were making the same declaration. Would that be seen as contentious? Very likely not. Rather, it would have been something lighthearted, humorous, tolerant, much in the spirit of, ‘look at these young men!’

The contentious issue of whether or not women have a right to their own bodies, whether the State has the right to decide what women should do with their bodies, isn’t only an issue for the US elections. As we wait for the results to be declared, it is time to reflect on our own practices and prejudices and hold up a mirror to our own society. That is what a truly reflective freedom means.

(Views expressed are personal)

Urvashi Butalia is the founder of Zubaan books

(This appeared in print as 'No Country For Women')