From Poland to Rwanda to America, reproductive rights are being decimated
WHAT THE POST-ROE FUTURE HOLDS
The internet was sparkling with #8M hashtags and glowing tributes for International Women’s Day this week — but from Poland to Rwanda to the United States, reproductive rights are being decimated.
The U.S. pharmacy chain Walgreens decided not to sell abortion medication in 21 states. It’s a blanket response to the various abortion restrictions that states are introducing after the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and to Republican attorneys who have threatened to sue pharmacies that distribute the pills. Rather than trying to navigate these choppy legal waters and sell meds according to the specifics of the law in each jurisdiction, Walgreens took the easy route by simply pulling the sale of mifepristone in every state where the company saw any risk of legal threats. California Governor Gavin Newsom responded by pulling a $54 million state contract with the drugstore giant. California will cut ties with “any company that cowers to the extremists and puts women’s lives at risk,” Newsom tweeted on Monday. “We’re done.”
Last week, a coalition of human rights groups urged U.N. experts to intervene in the restriction of abortions in the U.S. An open letter with 196 signatories, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch among them, asserted that “the US is in violation of its obligations under international human rights law.”
In Poland, which has been rewriting its abortion legislation since long before the overturning of Roe, the effects of the country’s abortion ban show what the future may hold for America. A Polish gynecologist’s patients have announced that they are filing a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights, after local authorities seized the doctor’s patient records as part of an investigation into reports that she aided an abortion.