The Dangerous Erosion of Women's Healthcare Rights

At 79 years old, I have lived through many changes in women’s healthcare. I have experienced both the joys and heartbreaks of pregnancy firsthand. Out of my five pregnancies, two resulted in live births, one ended in miscarriage, and two required medically necessary abortions. One was an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured, a life-threatening emergency that could have killed me. The other was a fetus that had died at 15 weeks and needed to be removed. In today’s political climate, I worry that I might not have received the lifesaving care I needed.

There is a growing and dangerous movement to strip abortion from healthcare, treating it as something separate from medical necessity. But the reality is that abortion is healthcare. It always has been. Women’s lives depend on it. The idea that politicians—many of whom have no medical training—are now making decisions that should be left to doctors and their patients is both infuriating and terrifying.

Worse still, there is a push to criminalize not just abortion but even discussing it. In South Carolina, where I live, Senate Bill 323 seeks to punish anyone who even talks to a pregnant woman about abortion. This is not just an attack on reproductive rights; it is an attack on free speech and basic medical privacy. It is absurd to think that a woman could be charged with a felony for seeking information about her own healthcare options. Additionally, South Carolina is among several states moving to classify abortion as a homicide, applying the same legal standards, defenses, and penalties as those used in cases involving the death of a person who has been born.

The personal has now become political in the most dangerous way. Women are being treated as second-class citizens, their bodily autonomy stripped away by laws that disregard the