Women’s healthcare rights are currently at risk in Texas due to a ban on abortion six weeks into pregnancy, once a heartbeat can be detected. 

After the law was passed in Texas, The Supreme Court reviewed it and, with a vote of five to four, ruled that they would not overturn it. Therefore, on Sept. 1, The Heartbeat Law went into effect unchallenged. 

This new law directly dismisses the 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, which ruled that the United States Constitution protects a woman’s right to choose whether she will have an abortion, without excessive government regulation. This ruling provides a right to access safe and legal abortions across the country. 

This law going into effect in Texas offers zero exceptions in cases of rape or incest and offers very few exceptions for life threatening conditions during pregnancy. 

At this point, you may be wondering: if abortion is a constitutional right protected by Roe v. Wade, how has this law not already been brought to court to be amended?

Well this law is being put into effect through a loophole in Roe v. Wade ruling. According to the law, actual lawmakers are not allowed to enforce it, but it is enforced by common citizens of Texas by suing clinics or people that receive or administer abortions past six weeks. 

This makes it very difficult for this law to be brought to court, because most abortion clinics don’t want to risk a lawsuit by breaking it. 

Therefore, a woman’s decision to do what she wants with her body is put in the hands of other people once again. Random people that you have never met, including men, could be the ones bringing you to court and prohibiting you from getting this healthcare. 

Not to mention this six week time period is, in all honesty, just unreasonable.

Most women cannot even tell that they are pregnant until a period is missed, which takes four weeks to detect. 

So under this law women are given only a short two weeks to recognize pregnancy, confirm it with a test, decided what they want to do, and obtain an abortion if that is what they choose. Given that they even know that they are pregnant in time.

This condensed time period does not make abortions easily accessible and can lead to unsafe illegal abortions which is exactly what Roe v. Wade was put in place to protect women from. 

This law will not stop all abortions from happening after six weeks of pregnancy, it will stop safe and accessible abortions from happening. Abortions will still happen past six weeks in unsafe and possibly life threatening ways. According to The Center for Disease Control, after Roe v. Wade was passed the number of illegal abortions administered dropped from 130,000 to 17,000 in the span of two short years. 

This statistic just highlights that this law will not stop abortions from happening after six weeks, but will just put women in danger by forcing them to figure out another way to get an abortion illegally. 

Because of this unjust law we are taking huge steps back as a society in keeping politics away from a woman’s body. Women and allies worked hard enough to get Roe v. Wade won in favor of the right to choose and this undermines these efforts and essentially wastes them.

In this day and age we should be far past the point where politics dictate a woman’s body and her right to choose what she wants to do with it. 

Imagine, for example, a woman who is dealing with a case of rape or incest. This would make something already traumatizing just that much more difficult to deal with. Political policies should be supporting women’s choices and not actively prohibiting us from being able to make our own choice over our own body. 

We should not be taking these steps back in history as a society, and it is due time that politics have nothing to do with what a woman does with her own body.