The Supreme Court ruling against free abortion not only increases the already alarming social and political polarization within the United States. It also separates the country from leadership in advances in civic and human rights, as those related to reproduction and women's control over their own bodies are internationally considered today. The resolution has put on guard a majority of governments integrated in the dominant tendency towards the recognition and decriminalization of abortion, at the same time that it can give wings to a minority group of nations in full retreat in this regard.
“International organizations and courts around the world recognize abortion as special medical care and an essential aspect of the fundamental human rights of women and girls,” underlines the president of the US Center for Reproductive Rights, Nancy Northup. And the Supreme Court ruling is "a wrecking ball" on such right.
The organization led by Northup recalls that in recent decades more than 50 countries have liberalized or expanded access to abortion. Argentina, Colombia, Ireland and Mexico are some of the last to do so in the West. And in Asia, India modified two years ago its law on the procedure, legal for half a century, to make it easier and more accessible despite maintaining limits on the decision-making capacity of women.
On the contrary, the persecution of abortion is going down all over the planet. With his sentence on Friday the 24th, the first Western superpower became one of only four countries in the world on Friday to veto or strongly restrict the right to abortion in the last 25 years, says Nancy Northup's organization, referring to Poland , Nicaragua and El Salvador.
The decision of the Supreme Court in Washington is "a great setback for women's rights and gender equality," said the head of UN Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet. “Limiting access to abortion does not stop people from seeking to undergo this procedure; it only makes it more deadly,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stated through his spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric. “Sexual and reproductive health and rights are the foundation for advances in choice, empowerment and equality for the world's women and girls,” added Dujarric.
The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, considered that the ruling approved by the ultra-conservative majority of six to three justices of the US Supreme Court is "very disappointing". Because “we must protect the rights of women. And I would have expected the United States to do it,” he stated.
The fear that the demolition of that right in the North American power will encourage other countries to follow the same path, fear evidenced by citizen mobilizations and public warnings from activists and leaders around the globe, is justified.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro reacted to the sentence with a tweet in which, along with a photo of himself holding a baby, he asked "that God continue to give strength and wisdom to those who protect the innocence and future of our children, in Brazil and all over the world”. Just the eve of the ruling in the US, Bolsonaro had been outraged that doctors had performed an abortion on an 11-year-old girl who had become pregnant as a result of rape.
In Germany, lawmakers on Friday ended a Nazi law banning the advertising of abortion services. Later, the prominent member of the ultra-Alternative for Germany party and granddaughter of a Hitler minister, Beatrix von Storch, considered that the US Supreme Court sent on Friday “a sign of hope for the unborn life that will radiate throughout the West ”.
Faced with such a possibility of "irradiation", and taking into account the growth of right-wing populism in Europe and the world, other leaders were quick to criticize or distance themselves from the judicial decision adopted in Washington. A decision that France wants to prevent there by means of a constitutional shield and that for the British Boris Johnson constitutes "a big step backwards" with "a clear massive impact on the thinking of people around the world." More emphatically, the Canadian Justin Trudeau spoke of a "horrible" sentence because "no government, politician or man should tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her body."
Nobody was silent. And the Vatican encouraged discussion through its Pontifical Academy for Life. There must be "a non-ideological debate about the place of the protection of life in a civil society," the institution said. The debate is served; the claim that it is not ideological seems utopian.
