Women's Reproductive Rights In The United States

Each year, millions people from all over the world fight for women’s rights of suffrage, equal employment, education, human rights and reproductive rights. The reproductive rights have a significant influence in women’s rights, especially in the United States. In the history of the United States, since eighteenth century the reproductive rights movement has been struggling because of its moral consideration, especially abortion. When abortion was a crime, the maternal deaths were high for women who resort to illegal abortions (Pollitt, 1997, p.112). Although the United States has been legalized abortion in the American contemporary history, the debate of health care coverage for abortion shapes the directions of social welfare reform. The Hyde …show more content…
Moreover, with the influence of the Hyde Amendment state legislatures approved many restrictions of abortion procedures including “mandatory waiting periods, parental notice and consent requirements, counseling requirements, and bans on partial birth abortions” (Barusch, 2014, p.389). These restrictions create unacceptable barriers to women’s access to their reproductive related services, particular many vulnerable women including adolescent women, low-income women, and women of color. According the Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, “repressive abortion policy creates serious undue burdens for women in these groups by limiting physical access to the services, by making the costs of services prohibitive, and by creating a social stigma surrounding abortion that challenges the self-trust and overall trust that women must have to confidently exercise sound reproductive choices” (Ely & Dulmus, 2010, p.660). This shows that abortion policy creates social and economic discrimination against those vulnerable women by forcing them to keep unwanted pregnancies or childbearing. As a result, the vulnerable women are in the risk of unsafe and illegal abortion, which leads the negative effects on their reproductive health. Some women are forced to raise the unwanted child, which can be lead to economic burden in family, or increasing the chance of child abuse and neglecting. One the other hand, women with high socioeconomic status enjoy their privilege to access reproductive health services without worrying about the high cost of abortion services. The Hyde Amendment and restrictive abortion polices negatively affect the health disparities between the privilege group and vulnerable women, the demand for abortion is increasing among the women of color. Acceding to the