At 62, I have watched the changes in abortion laws and how they have affected doctors and clinics. There has been an atmosphere of fear for more than fifteen years among doctors who do perform abortions in the United States for over ten years since Evangelical Christians, pushed by their leaders, made preventing access to abortions a national issue by getting hardline Conservatives and tea party patriots elected to state legislatures and to the federal government. The U.S. Supreme Court has, as result, made several decisions giving state legislatures more and more control over abortion, which is a back door way to eventually end Roe v Wade completely.
Some of those laws have included not allowing anyone under 18 to get an abortion unless they get written permission from a parent or guardian, going to court to get permission to get an abortion if a minor, only allowing abortions if the mother’s life is threatened (not for incest, rape, etc.), only allowing abortions to be performed by doctor’s ‘specially’ trained to do the procedure, only allowing abortions in hospitals, and limiting the number of abortion clinics and doctors.
Tens of thousands of women nationwide were often forced to go to another state to get an abortion as some states clinics were shut down while minors who could not get written permission from a parent or a judge couldn’t get an abortion or had to sneak off and go to clinics in another state where clinic operators turned a blind eye. Other women had no place to go. I read one story a few years back where a Mississippi woman shot herself in the stomach to abort her fetus.
Violence against abortion clinics has been on the rise for over a decade, and multiple abortion providers have been murdered like Dr. George Tiller, one of the few doctors who provided abortions in my home of KS. This is another reason many doctors in the U.S. either quit doing abortions, or won’t even consider it. And if Kavanaugh gets on the U.S. Supreme Court, he along with Trump’s first pick Gorsuch could very well overturn Roe v Wade if supported by other Conservatives seated on the bench by President George W. Bush, Roberts.
