Madison Kwiecinski – Editor-in-Chief

Mvk5945@psu.edu

When Roe v. Wade was overturned, you could feel the shift in women’s overall hope for their futures. Speaking as a woman, the world felt wrong outside because we all were aware that this was not a political argument at its core, but rather an exertion of power over women and a stripping of their rights. This was not a matter of states rights, but rather an entire political party saying we did not deserve the right of choice on this matter. 

To me, it is heartbreaking to know that the same people out there who protested and screamed in order to strip away my bodily autonomy, are the same people I would stand in the streets to protect if someone claimed they did not have the right to express those abhorrent views. We live in a country where people should be free to make their own decisions and hold their own beliefs; and even when I am strongly against those beliefs with everything in me, I would stand proudly to support their right to hold those beliefs. I stand for religious freedom, but that does not mean I support one’s personal moral and religious beliefs being imposed onto others. 

I have been a proud supporter of LGBTQ+ rights, of trans rights, of women’s rights, of human rights for as long as I have been able to form conscious thoughts on the issue, because one thing I do not support in any way is fostering a world where hate for other people is spread and pushed onto the children of the next generation. For these reasons, it makes me sick to know there are people whose primary mission in the world right now is making sure that other people cannot live as their true selves or love who they wish. It makes me sick to know people instill these beliefs on their children, who otherwise would remain innocent but instead have hate pushed into their hearts. 

From Roe being overturned to the rulings issued by federal judges this week on access to medications, the country is being set back decades, into an era where women’s health is not only not a priority, but is also not a guarantee. A federal judge from Texas attempted to ban the drug mifepristone, a drug that has been permitted by the FDA for over two decades for safe drug-induced abortions, claiming it was not approved properly. 

Not only is this unprecedented, as no Judge has previously overturned what the FDA approves, but it is also an intentional assault on healthcare once again. Mifepristone is a safe drug that has been used to treat numerous things other than abortion, and does not even prevent abortions to begin with. 

People will tell you repeatedly you are overreacting when speaking on how far back women’s reproductive care has been set in the last two years, but there is no other way of addressing this. Typically, at-home abortion treatment or pill-induced abortion treatment requires two drugs in order to make the process smoother and less painful for women. 

Typically, patients would first take mifepristone, and then 24-48 hours later they would ingest misoprostol. This is the treatment typically used in the US, and after the second drug is administered it should take between 4-6 hours to pass the failed pregnancy. 

If the Texas judge ruling is upheld and mifepristone is no longer available for use, the procedure would continue to be prescribed with several doses of misoprostol. This would require women seeking an abortion to take misoprostol three hours apart for three to four doses of the drug, making the failed pregnancy pass in 9-12 hours. 

A judge banned a medication that has a primary purpose of easing women’s pain in a procedure that already exists, a drug proven to be safe and meant simply to reduce symptoms. According to NPR, “Patients using misoprostol alone, however, tend to experience more nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and a longer duration of cramping and bleeding.” 

Truthfully, I do not see another way this can be viewed other than to physically punish women for the decisions they make with their own bodies. In what other civilized country do they ban safe healthcare medication in order to force women to experience more pain when seeking medical care? 

This is just one example from a long list of ways women’s healthcare has been setback dramatically. When Roe was overturned, they S.C. hid behind the shallow claim that they were overturning this historic decision in order to take rights away from women to give back to the states. Now Judges push to ban medications that are safe on a national scale, trying to ban safe medical procedures across the nation. Would you call that turning the issue back to the states? I sure would not, and I think it is baffling people actually believe that is what the right was pushing for when asking Roe to be overturned. This is not a national v state issue, but rather a moral war that has been being waged for decades. 

Maybe now people will acknowledge that the reasoning behind that decision was volatile, with the political motivations so thinly veiled. They took away the federal protections claiming it was for the states, knowing that in over a dozen of them this would lead to an immediate ban and criminalization of healthcare. Now, we watch as they slowly try to find ways to implement nationwide bans on the medications that make abortion safe and accessible to begin with. 

Before abortion was available and medically safe, women would risk their lives to find ways of ending a pregnancy they desperately did not want to feel feed off of their bodies for the next nine months. Women died trying to find safe alternatives to ending unwanted pregnancies, but we do not talk about that. 

Women are dying today in states that have removed all of their safe and legal options. Women today are importing non-FDA approved abortion medications from Switzerland, because our government will not provide necessary medical care to women because of their poorly educated and hateful laws. Women are feeling their bodies slip into states of disease and distress as doctors, those meant to protect us, are forced to leave rotting, already naturally deceased fetuses inside their bodies because the legislators in that state believe those women should have to suffer that way despite medical reasoning. 

The Republican party, the party that places such high priority on personal privacy, wants to allow the state to pull womens medical records and use them in court. They have written laws that make the process of finding women who have had abortions equivalent to finding women accused with witchcraft hundreds of years ago. 

If you have read all of this and not one part of you has felt sympathy for the women who have had their personal bodily autonomy stripped away from them, then maybe instead you will care about the plausible repercussions those who cannot carry children may face because of these decisions. 

The Texas judge ruling this week should strike fear into everyone, because every federal judge in the country should not have the power to determine if medication we have had access to for decades are appropriate. This is unprecedented, terrifying, and has the potential to set a dangerous precedent that could affect everyone living in this country. The protection of medical privacy as a whole is under attack with the overturning of Roe, but again, we do not talk about that because this is being viewed as a women’s issue when it has the potential to affect so many aspects of so many people’s lives. 

Author’s Note: This article was written before arguments were heard at the Supreme Court on the Texas Judge’s ruling on mifepristone. The medication will not be banned in all 50 states now that the case has been heard. However, I think the relevancy of this article and the points that have been made within it stand, perhaps even more so now. Despite the fact that this court ruling was a direct attack on women’s healthcare, based on unprecedented legal grounds, there was no deterrence in attempting to remove these protections women need access too. This was an outrageous court ruling I am grateful was not permitted to go into effect, but that does not change the clearly prominent proof that there are people willing to go entirely too far in order to remove women’s access to the things they need in order to protect their personal moral prerogative.