After Ohio’s recent vote to enshrine the right to have an abortion into the state’s constitution, host Robert Scheer dives deeper into one of the underappreciated and underreported aspects of the fight for abortion rights on this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast.
Sydney Calkin, a senior lecturer in the School of Geography at Queen Mary University of London, discusses her newest book, “Abortion Pills Go Global: Reproductive Freedom Across Borders,” and breaks down the myths and misconceptions about one of the biggest tools for bringing women’s reproductive rights to the forefront.
Calkin makes the case that abortion pills provide a safe, often cheap and even potentially undetectable means for women to have an abortion. Using years of research, studying various countries, including the United States, under varied legal circumstances with regard to reproductive rights, Calkin comes to a powerful revelation: regardless of the law, women can now access their own safe and effective abortion procedures in the form of these pills.
“The debate has really moved beyond whether a government can regulate what an abortion provider does in a clinic and ban abortion by restricting that abortion provider. People are going online and they're getting their own pills,” Calkin said.
While these pills should not necessarily directly substitute real legislation, Calkin explains that support for this sort of self-care movement believes it will force the hand of government: “They think that creating access on the ground to abortion pills is what will trigger reform in legislatures and in courts. They think that making it so that people can access pills regardless of the laws under which they live will eventually show the public and show lawmakers that abortion bans simply don't work. They're inhumane, they're unenforceable, and that there will then be reform and there will then be decriminalization of abortion.”
