The week before the 2024 election, a gut-wrenching advertisement created by a progressive campaign fund went viral. A young woman lays curled up on her living room floor, sobbing. Her frantic partner is on the phone, begging a doctor to tell him what to do. An authoritative male voice answers: “She needs an abortion or she’s going to die from the pregnancy.” An older white man wearing a red tie suddenly appears and says: “Sorry, that’s not happening. I’m your Republican Congressman. Now that we’re in charge, we banned abortion.” The ad exhorts viewers to “Save her life.” The woman never speaks.
The ad seized on a series of horrifying, real life stories of pregnant women left to bleed out in parking lots, drive to multiple states to outrun sepsis, and die in a hospital surrounded by medical professionals. These women experienced medical emergencies and needed abortions, which state bans prohibited. In response, advocates, commentators, and legislators shamed states for preventing doctors from doing their jobs, using the near-constant refrain that “abortion is health care.”
Abortion is health care in the broad sense of the term, and certainly in the instances described above. The World Health Organization defines health “as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being,” and abortion promotes all of these. The underlying message, however, isn’t just that abortion promotes health, but that health care is politically neutral, and that it’s grounded in medical expertise and objective professional judgment.
But in fact, many feminists working towards abortion rights in the 1960s and ’70s would have viewed this framing with suspicion—if not vehement disagreement. The movement to reform criminal abortion laws coincided with increased skepticism toward the medical profession by the Patients’ Rights and Women’s Health movements, which challenged what they saw as paternalistic, patriarchal, and profit-driven physicians….
