Letter: Body Autonomy Is A Democratic Right

To the editor,

It is no coincidence that the attacks on body autonomy rights are coinciding with the attacks against people's ability to participate in our democratic process with unnecessary barriers. The right to decide if and when someone starts a family or terminates a pregnancy is a human right, a civil right, a constitutional right, and guarantees half of the population are viewed as humans with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is also why authoritarian leaders like Nicolae Ceausescu, Joseph Stalin, Rafael Trujillo, Viktor Orban, Andrzej Duda, and Vladimir Putin fought and have fought to limit people's ability to access reproductive rights. Male autocrats see patriarchal authoritarianism as crucial for their political survival, but one of the core demands of feminism — that women should be free to control our own bodies and reproductive lives — is in direct conflict with the coercive, often pronatalist policies of authoritarian states, which see declining birth rates as an existential crisis.

We are witnessing this same rollback on reproductive rights across the nation in states like Texas, Florida and Missouri, where lawmakers have proposed and sometimes passed bills that would impose civil liabilities on anyone who helps a resident of that state travel out of state to obtain an abortion, even if the abortion is lawful in that other state. Luckily for us here lawmakers are championing a bill in the General Assembly that would prohibit Connecticut from participating in violating another individual's right to medical privacy, being forced to enforce another state's barbaric anti-choice laws, and would protect the healthcare workers who perform the abortion care in our state from frivolous lawsuits. The risk of lawsuits like this is bound to intensify according to many legal experts as the Supreme Court throws up their hands and lets healthcare go the way of "The Handmaid's Tale."

Connecticut already has a tragic history of not protecting its most vulnerable citizens who are seeking abortion care. In 1965, 28-year-old Gerry Santoro bled to death on a motel room floor in Norwich after attempting to self-induce an abortion fearing her abusive ex-husband would kill her if he found out she was pregnant by another man. Our state vowed that would never happen again by codifying the right to abortion care in 1990 and ensuring there are very little unnecessary barriers as possible. Now other states are attempting to attack our healthcare workers and anyone fleeing to our state seeking safe and legal abortion care. We have an obligation to tell those not from our state that if they don't believe abortion is healthcare and body autonomy is a human right then they can go jump in the Long Island Sound. Pleasure Island I hear would make an excellent diving board for them.

Leanne Harpin

Fairfield