Educated Decision

There have been a lot of social changes in the Western world over the last one hundred years ...

Votes For Women Started The Changes

  ..... especially from the point of view of women.

Some such as the move towards equality under the law, employment opportunities, and job promotions, are in the main welcome changes, especially for University educated women who have professional careers (women at the bottom end of the education scale, have possibly not enjoyed so much of these changes). In fact the women's rights and votes for women campaign was strongly linked with the Marie Stopes birth control clinics and movement from the very start of this process.

So one of the key areas of this social change has been women's control of their bodies reproductive patterns, which has allowed them to determine whether or when to have a child. Now in the 1980's and earlier, it was rare for a university educated woman to have a child out of wedlock, even if that was not necessarily the case for all women with working class backgrounds. Even as late as 1996, only one in 25 women in their 30's with a university education had had their first child out of wedlock.

 

However a recent study by the John Hopkins University in the USA, has found that now nearly one in four university educated women had their first child before marriage ..... a change that can't really be for the better, but perhaps reflects the times we live in. Money worries, unstable relationships, and the attainment of other markers, such as career progressions or home ownership, apparently mean that starting a family later has impacted on whether the women are prepared to wait for marriage, before they start that first child. 

Now this control over their reproductive patterns has been a distinguishing feature of Western culture over other perhaps less enlightened areas, but as discussed in earlier posts, the rest of the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa have also shown a reproductive rate drop in the last 30 years, as women's education has spread. However as the rise of the Taliban has shown, that is a fragile advancement in many cultures. 

 

The US Is Split Over Abortion (As Well As Race) ...

 

But now there are worrying signs that the US is moving in a retrograde direction on women's right to control their bodies, with some states such as Texas (Idaho, Oklahoma and South Carolina  have similar laws held up in legal challenges), eliminating the right to abortion after 6 weeks of pregnancy, (replacing the between 22 and 24 weeks federal laws), and even then, they have virtually removed the ability to actually get the abortion, if the woman is even aware of being pregnant by the 6 weeks. 

 

This is because the women's health and family planning centres where abortions are often performed, are often under constant picket by religious 'right to life' campaigners, who also now have the right in Texas to sue anyone who "aids and abets" an 'illegal' abortion, which puts the clinics under the constant threat of legal action. The threat is so great that the Federal government has had to declare that they will protect abortion clinics from physical attack, using the FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances) Act of 1994.

 

Some brave doctors are declaring themselves as guilty of breaking these state laws, in order to get a trial and force the US Supreme Court to declare whether Roe v Wade is still the federal law or not (and thus supersede state laws). However this is now something of a risky move, because the US supreme court make-up is leaning more towards the conservative right, after Donald Trumps last court appointment, with it now comprising of six socially conservative justices, as opposed to three socially liberal .... so there is a possibility that they will overthrow Roe v Wade ... in fact the liberal establishment have been so rattled by this possibility, that President Joe Biden has been forced to criticise the Texas Act, describing it as "extreme" and saying it "blatantly violates the constitutional right established under Roe v. Wade".

 

The fact that the USA is having this battle, and could even end up with women's rights reversing in many states, is actually worrying for women worldwide, because it would be used as a justification for far more regression by states and countries elsewhere.