“It’s disheartening to hear that the U.S. wants to advocate or comment about other countries and how they treat women, but yet here we are trying to control a person’s decision about their own reproductive care and access,” says NOW’s Nunes. “We have to think deeper about how we’re looking as a country.”
Reversing Roe would cause an access gap between those who have the means and resources to travel for an abortion and those who don’t said, Nunes. “Those with money are still going to have access to abortion,” she said. “Certain communities are going to be the ones that are most affected by this access: women of color, women with disabilities, LGBTQIA members, women in poverty. We’re going to go back to a time where people have to seek unsafe underground abortion practices since they can’t afford to travel to states.”
Gender-based violence, at its core, is about power and control, said Bear Atwood, vice president of the National Organization for Women. With domestic violence specifically, “intimate relationships are the place where there’s the most access for a person to exercise power and control.”
“Threats to our bodily autonomy and reproductive healthcare are still rampant, and politicians are still using the courts to impose an ultra-conservative and misogynist agenda to dominate and control women’s lives,” the National Organization for Women said in a statement last month.
For many women, this September seems to have been a turning point, explains Ms. Nunes. “The fact September saw so many women leave the workforce shows the difficulty many are facing balancing the shift in caregiving arrangements as their children go back to school,” she says.
