Before having an abortion, Piper would have liked to consider her decision. But since Arizona risks resurrecting an 1864 law banning virtually all procedures, thinking is a luxury it can no longer afford.
“There is a lot of uncertainty at the moment in Arizona,” regrets this thirty-year-old who prefers to give a pseudonym, in a clinic in Phoenix.
A sword of Damocles has hung over the women of this southwestern American state since the beginning of April, when the local justice system deemed a 160-year-old abortion law valid.
This text dating back to the Civil War prohibits all abortions, unless the mother’s life is in danger. Rape or incest are not considered valid exceptions.
The decision caused a shock in the United States, where the constitutional right to abortion is no longer guaranteed since a decision by the Supreme Court in 2022. Before the presidential election in November which should, barring any surprises, see Joe Biden to oppose Donald Trump once again, it puts the question at the center of the political game.
In Arizona, where abortion was until now permitted up to 15 weeks of pregnancy, it above all creates a race against time for many women, faced with an ocean of uncertainties.
“Anxiety”
“Patients’ anxiety has skyrocketed,” Gabrielle Goodrick, director of the Camelback Family Planning clinic, told AFP. Because the measure is “draconian, overwhelming.”
Her establishment receives 20 to 30 women per day. These days, phones there are constantly ringing with requests for information and appointments, while antiabortion activists sometimes station themselves in the parking lot to try to dissuade patients.
The application of the law, which provides for between two and five years of imprisonment for doctors performing abortions, remains very uncertain.
Kris Mayes, the Democratic attorney general of Arizona, has vowed that she will not prosecute any doctor or woman for an abortion.
But this magistrate is not eternal, and the text could formally come into force on June 8, with a limitation period of seven years, according to Ms.me Goodrick.
“If in two years a Republican attorney general is elected, he could go back” and initiate proceedings, the doctor fears.
His clinic therefore plans to no longer offer abortions this summer.
“In the long term, we don’t want to have any problems,” continues the doctor, without hiding her disappointment.
“It’s frustrating, but at the same time it’s not unexpected with the rise of Trump […] and these extreme opinions,” she regrets.
The former Republican president regularly recalls that he gave a majority of conservative judges to the Supreme Court, which made it possible to cancel the constitutional protection of the right to abortion two years ago.
“Traumatic experience”
Since then, around twenty American states have banned or severely restricted access to abortion. But the subject has become an electoral bogey which handicaps the conservatives.
“Forcing a woman to have a baby is a traumatic experience, they don’t understand what it means,” says a patient from neighboring Texas, where abortion is severely restricted.
Mr. Trump himself acknowledged that Arizona’s 1864 law, with no exceptions for rape and incest, went “too far.”
The embarrassment extends to the ranks of local Republicans, who control the State Parliament. A handful of them joined Democrats in the Lower House to vote to abolish the text, which was largely unpopular in the polls.
The law could thus be relegated to oblivion in the coming weeks. But for this, the local Senate must also vote for abolition and the debates there promise to be lively.
In the meantime, the Democrats are capitalizing on their defense of the right to abortion, to make it a major argument in favor of the re-election of Joe Biden – Arizona is a key state where he beat Donald Trump by barely 10,000 voice in 2020.
Local senator Eva Burch particularly made an impression in March, recounting to parliamentarians the difficulties she encountered in obtaining an abortion, despite the fact that her fetus was not viable.
Arizona “creates a really hostile and inhospitable environment for women” that helps “deter them from the experience of pregnancy,” she said.
