Mississippi Attorney General Says Overturning Roe v. Wade Will Give Women “Amazing” Choices - Vanity Fair

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According to Lynn Fitch, curtailing legal access to abortions will improve women’s lives. 

By Bess Levin

September 29, 2021

In less than three months, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments concerning a Mississippi abortion law and the stakes, for those who think pregnant people should have the right to decide what to do with their bodies, could not be higher. The case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, will offer an opportunity for the court’s conservative judges to overturn Roe v. Wade, and given their decision to let Texas effectively ban abortion at six weeks, there’s a very real possibility that nearly five decades of precedent will be shredded overnight. Obviously, that’s a horrifying prospect to millions of people, particularly the ones who may decide at some point that they don’t want to have a child. But according to Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, forcing someone to carry a pregnancy to term will actually improve their life, and they’ll probably even thank the government in the end.

In an interview last week, Fitch boldly claimed that ending most legalized abortion will “empower” women to both raise children and pursue careers. “Think about this,” Fitch told EWTN Pro-Life Weekly host Catherine Hadro, “The lives that will be touched, the babies that will be saved, the mothers that will get the chance to really redirect their lives. And they have all these opportunities that they didn’t have 50 years ago. Fifty years ago, professional women, they really wanted you to make a choice. Now you don’t have to. Now you have the opportunity to be whatever you want to be. You have the option in life to really achieve your dream and goals, and you can have those beautiful children as well.”

Disturbingly, she continued: “Just think about the uplifting, the changing of course for women that have for these new babies, these women. And everyone knows it’s all right, it’s acceptable. You can have these beautiful children and you can have your careers. And so this really gets into, how do we empower women? How do we prepare for that next step? And we have to look at it with this whole vision and strategy. And I just think God has given us this opportunity to be here.”

Ya hear that, ladies? You can have it all, minus the right to choose. An amazing life is just around the corner, as soon as you give birth to, raise, and pay for a child the government insists you have.

As New York notes, Fitch didn’t just make this claim in a Catholic radio interview—she also made it the basis of her argument in her brief to the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, writing: “The march of progress has left Roe and Casey behind. Those cases maintained that an unwanted pregnancy could doom women to ‘a distressful life and future,’ that abortion is a needed complement to contraception, and that viability marked a sensible point for when state interests in unborn life become compelling. Factual developments undercut those assessments. Today, adoption is accessible and on a wide scale women attain both professional success and a rich family life, contraceptives are more available and effective, and scientific advances show that an unborn child has taken on the human form and features months before viability.”

In other words, an unwanted pregnancy could have ruined someone’s life 50 years ago, but now? Not so much. Never mind the fact that in 2021, a person can still get pregnant through rape or incest, not have the means to support a child, or simply not want one. Setting aside the idea that someone should be able to terminate a pregnancy for whatever reason they choose, the economic factor is obviously a significant one, as more than 150 economists and researchers noted in their counter-brief to Dobbs, writing:

Although women experience unintended pregnancies and seek abortions at varying stages of life, one common thread is that many of these women already face difficult financial circumstances. Approximately 49% of women who seek abortions are poor, 75% are low income, 59% already have children, and 55% report a recent disruptive life event such as the death of a close friend or family member, job loss, the termination of a relationship with a partner, or overdue rent or mortgage obligations. As explained above, these women also overwhelmingly lack access to paid maternity leave or to affordable childcare. 

Given these circumstances, questions abound as to what happens to women who cannot obtain an abortion they wanted to have. The Turnaway Study is a longitudinal study that focuses on financial outcomes for women in this situation. It compares women who arrived at abortion facilities just prior to a gestational age cut-off and were able to obtain an abortion—the “near-limit group”—to women who arrived just past this cut-off and were turned away—the “turnaway group.” Researchers linked study participants to their annual Experian credit report data, providing an objective measurement of what happened next in the financial lives of these women…. The authors demonstrated that, up until the point that they sought abortions, financial outcomes were trending very similarly for the near-limit and turnaway groups. Then, exactly at the point in their lives where one group obtained an abortion and the other group was turned away, the turnaway group began to experience substantial financial distress relative to the near-limit group, such that over the subsequent five years, the average woman in the turnaway group experienced a 78% increase in past-due debt and an 81% increase in public records related to bankruptcies, evictions, and court judgments. The financial effects of being denied an abortion are thus as large or larger than those of being evicted, losing health insurance, being hospitalized, or being exposed to flooding due to a hurricane.

Sounds pretty awful, particularly if one gives birth in Mississippi, where, as Slate writes, “at every stage of pregnancy, life is difficult for Mississippians who are not wealthy.” Among other disturbing stats, Mississippi’s maternal mortality rate is reportedly significantly higher than the national average; its infant mortality rate has been the highest in the country; Black mothers are roughly three times as likely to die as white mothers; Black infants are four times as likely to experience birth defects as white infants; and more than half of Mississippi’s counties do not have an OB-GYN or a delivering hospital. Meanwhile:

For newborns and their parents, the situation is equally grim. The lack of medical services in the state’s rural regions prevents infants from receiving adequate care. And the state kicks new mothers off Medicaid just two months after birth. This year, bipartisan lawmakers in the Mississippi Senate pushed to permanently extend postpartum Medicaid coverage to a full year after birth—but Republican legislators in the Mississippi House scuttled the proposal. The state’s high uninsured rate would be even worse if Fitch had her way: Last year, the attorney general asked the Supreme Court to repeal Obamacare, a decision that would have stripped health insurance from at least 111,000 Mississippians.

To many new parents, then, Mississippi offers an excruciating choice: Return to work immediately or lose your health insurance. Mothers who do return to work may be paid less than their male peers: Mississippi is the only state in the nation with no law guaranteeing equal pay for equal work. The United States is one of just two countries in the world with no national paid leave policy for parents. And like most states, Mississippi does not mandate paid parental leave. (State workers, including Fitch’s own employees, receive no guaranteed paid parental leave, either.) Low-income parents in Mississippi may qualify for child care assistance if they work at least 25 hours every week. But the state regularly puts beneficiaries through “redetermination,” which requires them to reapply for the subsidies; many are then denied reenrollment for opaque reasons. During the pandemic, an aggressive “redetermination” forced as many as 4,100 parents off this assistance, depriving up to 7,300 children of child care.

But according to Fitch, God, and the state of Mississippi, have given y’all an “opportunity.” How very exciting.

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