Two Years Post-Dodd

Opinion

Just how many people has the Dobbs decision killed?

It’s not just the loss of life we mourn. It’s the loss of personhood.

The act authorizing Arkansas’ Monument to the Unborn, passed last year, explains that “from 1973 until 2022, Arkansas was prevented from protecting the life of unborn children” by Supreme Court decisions such as Roe v. Wade.

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We all know what happened in 2022. On June 24, in Dobbs v. Jackson, the conservative majority removed federal protection for abortion that had stood for almost 50 years.

“As of today,” wrote Justice Stephen G. Breyer, dissenting along with Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, “this Court holds, a State can always force a woman to give birth, prohibiting even the earliest abortions. A State can thus transform what, when freely undertaken, is a wonder into what, when forced, may be a nightmare.”

The Arkansas birthrate has gone up an estimated 1.4 percent since the state began forcing its residents to carry pregnancies to term. That means about 500 additional births a year. In all states with total bans, including Arkansas and 13 others, the birthrate has increased an average of 2.3 percent. In Texas, where geography makes it especially difficult to travel out of state for an abortion, the rate increased by 5.1 percent. All told, early estimates indicate that the end of Roe accounts for 32,000 annual additional births.

Buried under that approximate number of compulsory births lies another number: the lives that Dobbs has ended.

We need a monument to them.

Consider, for a moment, the people who have died in the past two years from complications of pregnancies they wanted to end but couldn’t.

When a state forces people to carry pregnancies to term — at least 14 times more likely to result in death than an abortion — it forces them to risk their lives. Some inevitably fall — have fallen — on the wrong side of the odds. Those lives have been lost to Dobbs.

In fact, abortion bans make pregnancy even more dangerous than it already was. In abortion-ban states, patients with ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages and excessive hemorrhaging — conditions that call for abortion care — can’t be treated until fetal heartbeats disappear or patients are on the brink of death. One Texas study found those delays nearly doubled the serious complications patients suffered.

Surely some patients died while doctors had to wait or wonder whether they were sick enough to treat. Although every state abortion ban includes an exception to save the life of the pregnant person, few exceptions are actually granted.

And then there are desperate people in abortion-ban states who have tried to end their pregnancies by unsafe means. We know that unsafe abortions can kill. Since these decisions are shrouded in secrecy, stigma and potential legal jeopardy, we might never know how many.

Still, those losses are the easier ones to count. The true cost of Dobbs is far greater. The people for whom carrying an unwanted pregnancy exacerbates the heart disease or depression that ultimately kills them. The people trapped in lethal abusive relationships because they are forced to bear their abusers’ children. The babies with fatal birth defects who are consigned to brief lives of pain and suffering.

We don’t know these numbers. We won’t know these numbers.

And we will never know how many lives Dobbs altered, stunted, constrained and burdened. How many educations it deferred or denied, how many careers it derailed, how many families it broke. Every person who is forced to give birth is a person whose life has been unwillingly, irrevocably changed.

Losing the right to end a pregnancy affects not just pregnant people, though; it affects everyone who could get pregnant.

In the states where abortion is illegal, half the inhabitants no longer possess their own lives. Not fully. The state is holding them hostage to faulty birth control, insufficient sex education, predatory men, youth, ignorance, poverty and bad luck.

Just from ages 11 to, say, 51. Then they can have them back.

Those in states that still recognize the right to abortion are safer. But we’ve lost the ability to move about the country confident of being treated as free and equal citizens wherever we settle. We’ve lost the security of knowing that whatever political winds blow through our statehouses, our Constitution will protect the fundamental right to control our own lives. Dobbs took that from us, too.

Construction on the Arkansas Monument to the Unborn is set to begin this summer. Early sketches indicate it will comprise a 10-by-33-foot “living wall” on capitol grounds in Little Rock, with lights, benches, recorded waterfall sounds and biblical quotations.

A monument to the lives lost to Dobbs has yet to be designed.

Since the numbers are incalculable and so many of victims cannot be named, it could be a simple white marble sarcophagus like the Tomb of the Unknowns.

Since we can’t know the directions lost lives would have taken, it could be engraved with a “decision tree” with one side lopped off. The monument could be encircled by real trees bent sideways, as if they grew in relentless winds. Or perhaps walls with empty picture and diploma frames, shelves of books and albums with blank covers, displays of election ballots and movie credits with blanks where the names of candidates and camera operators would be.

But it’s not just the loss of life we mourn and it’s not just the loss of life achievement. It’s the loss of personhood. It’s all the people some states have declared — and the court has confirmed — are no longer quite people, with full rights to their own lives.

For them — for us — perhaps the most appropriate memorial consists of signatures. Millions of signatures, on petitions to put reproductive freedom on this year’s ballot in states across the country. In Colorado, Florida, Maryland and South Dakota those petitions have already succeeded. In Arizona, Montana and Nebraska, activists are collecting signatures now.

Arkansans have until July 5 to gather enough signatures to put a constitutional amendment restoring abortion rights on their ballot. If you live there and you wish to honor the lives lost to Dobbs, you can add your name.