“This is happening in your real life. Wake up, people. Wake up.” — Elisabeth Moss, The Guardian, May 2018

Sadly, Elisabeth Moss is right. It is time to wake up and acknowledge that women in the United States are under attack as their rights to reproductive health — and in particular access to abortion — are systematically and comprehensively eroded, and women are increasingly treated as hosts to be denied autonomy and agency in the interests of the developing fetus.

The week of 30 April–5 May 2018 illustrated this starkly. It began with an opinion piece in the Washington Post by Ilyse Hogue of NARAL Pro-Choice America entitled “Think abortion should be punished? Take a look around” and ended with the Governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, signing the so-called “heartbeat bill” into law on Friday 4th May.

By signing Senate File 359 into law, Governor Reynolds ensured that physicians in Iowa are required to test for fetal heartbeat and, having detected one — which can occur as early as 6 weeks’ gestation — are prohibited from performing an abortion unless a medical emergency exists. In January 2017, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists had issued a statement strongly opposing such legislation, describing it as an “unconstitutional and unnecessary political interference in the practice of medicine.”

Claims that women are not prosecuted for having an abortion are sadly untrue. In 2011, Bei Bei Shuai was charged with murder and attempted feticide in Indiana following her suicide attempt and the subsequent death of her baby; she served 14 months in prison before a plea deal. In 2015, Purvi Patel was sentenced to twenty years in prison for self-inducing abortion in Indiana — her conviction was overturned on appeal. In Tennessee, Anna Yocca, who had attempted to self-induce an abortion using a coat hanger, pleaded guilty to attempted procurement of a miscarriage after spending more than a year in prison initially facing a charge of attempted murder.

Attempts to re-criminalise abortion, to punish women with incarceration or death for having an abortion, and the artificial sustaining of brain-dead women in order to permit the delivery of a viable fetus should leave us in no doubt that women, pregnant women, are at grave risk in the United States. These developments reflect a narrative that women, once pregnant, are mere incubators for the fetus — to be stripped of their rights, subjugated to the needs of a fetus, and robbed of their human dignity, even in death.

This IS real, people. Wake up!