Indiana lawmakers will convene on Wednesday to consider banning abortion, which has been legal and available to women for nearly 50 years. The United States Supreme Court decided last week to strip federal abortion rights protections and handed to the states the decision on whether abortion will remain legal.
Women comprise more than half of the population of the state of Indiana. Yet next week, no less than their right to bodily autonomy and personal control of their own lives will be in the hands of the 34 women and 116 men who control the Indiana General Assembly.
If ours were a simpler world, we might have simpler laws. Such as, if you oppose abortion, do not have one. But we live in a world where the rights of individuals are subjugated and circumscribed for any number of reasons.
A woman’s right to an abortion was never absolute. So it was startling to read in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling that our local state lawmakers, Rep. Ryan Lauer and Sen. Greg Walker, said they would be open to an absolute ban on abortions.
Now that the supermajority Republican lawmakers in the Indiana General Assembly have a clear path to do as they please regarding abortion, they owe it to Hoosiers to act with restraint, compassion, humility, and above all, humanity.
We believe lawmakers must at the very least provide exceptions to a total ban on abortion for women whose pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, or whose pregnancy poses a risk to the life of the mother.
Regardless of anyone’s personal views about abortion, this decision our lawmakers are planning to take is about so much more. Yes, it is about women’s right to bodily autonomy and control of their own lives, but it’s also about how much we as a state value personal privacy. The decision is also about how much control over a woman’s life we are willing to sacrifice to the state.
Abortion-rights supporters and opponents are unlikely to ever see eye-to-eye, but you would think some common ground might be found in the proposition that the relationship between a woman and her doctor should be sacrosanct. Who is the state of Indiana or any other meddlesome party to intrude in that relationship? Yet that is exactly what the Indiana legislature is inviting, if not insisting upon, if it chooses to widely ban abortion.
This decision also will be about the kind of state that Indiana is and will be in the future. Do we trust women to have agency to make decisions about their lives and their bodies? And assuming for the sake of argument that the answer to this question is no, what is the punishment for a woman who chooses to terminate a pregnancy for reasons that until now were simply no one else’s business?
What do we do with a doctor who advises a woman that an abortion is a medical necessity? What about a doctor who performs an abortion that is medically necessary? What do we do about a woman who travels out of state to obtain an abortion? What about a woman who has a miscarriage, then seeks medical attention?
These questions are just the tip of the iceberg — an iceberg the Indiana General Assembly will sail directly into on Wednesday.
