Introduction 

Flames filled the Los Angeles sky as the apocalyptic fire storm raged, ravaging neighborhoods with stunning celerity. People, animals, and homes were lost in what seemed only minutes. Tens of thousands suddenly joined the ranks of Los Angeles’ homeless, while firefighters from around the country and volunteers from California prisons and Mexico battled the flames and fought to contain them. Just months before, the power of hurricane Helene shattered long-held assumptions that people in the mountains were safe from extreme weather, as the storm’s flooding tore whole towns to shreds and destroyed the lives of thousands in Western North Carolina.

In light of these horrors, you might think the climate crisis spotlight should be exclusively focused on urgent immediate needs of mitigation and adaptation, to halt the accelerating climate crisis while helping communities prepare for the worst. It might seem ridiculous, even irresponsible, to pose the question: How can reproductive rights help save the planet? You might scratch your head and wonder, what do reproductive rights have to do with confronting the climate crisis? 

The answer is simple: everything.

And the world changed: the Dobbs Decision 

On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS), in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, ruled that the US Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, overturning Roe v. Wade and ending nearly 50 years of the right to abortion. The decision immediately angered and frightened millions of women in the United States and threatened abortion rights around the world.

The Dobbs decision was the result of an increasingly political US Supreme Court, growing rightwing movements, and Christian Nationalist political influence. The decision is part of a broader effort to turn back the clock and reverse women’s rights, including access to birth control and protection from domestic violence. The overturning of Roe v. Wade targets not only women; it is also an attack on democracy. The vast majority of US people believe that abortion should be legal and available. Therefore SCOTUS’ action goes against the will of the people and imposes the will of a minority.

Women, Climate Change, and Gender Inequality 

The impact of climate change on women has become part of the climate crisis dialogue, often focusing on women’s role in disaster response and in the forced migration process that accompanies climate change. The direct impacts on women’s health, and reproductive health in particular, are often overlooked. A welcome exception is Grist Magazine’s recent series looking at reproductive issues women currently face in the climate crisis.

Attention to women and climate change is linked to the growing international focus on global inequalities. The assessment of global gender inequality has highlighted inequalities faced by women in many aspects of social, economic, and family life, including access to education, role in agriculture, marriage and divorce practices, and legal rights, including land ownership and inheritance. These issues are all important. Some of the most insightful and well-informed efforts addressing global gender inequality place bodily autonomy at the heart of the work for women’s equality.

Bodily Autonomy 

Bodily autonomy is the fundamental right of an individual to have control over and make decisions about their own body without external interference or coercion. Bodily autonomy is a foundational principle of human rights and a core principle in bioethics.

Bodily autonomy is protected by international law. In 1969 the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) was formed to ensure sexual and reproductive rights and choices for all. UNFPA explains, “Not only is bodily autonomy a human right, it is the foundation upon which other human rights are built. It is included, implicitly or explicitly, in many international rights agreements, such as the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.”

Bodily autonomy includes a range of issues related to an individual’s self-determination. Key elements of bodily autonomy are choice and consent regarding sexual activity, freedom from violence and other bodily harm, personal identity, informed consent in healthcare, and reproductive rights.

Reproductive rights are at the heart of bodily autonomy for women, ensuring women’s decision-making about contraception, pregnancy, childbirth, and abortion. They emphasize women’s right to make choices about their reproductive health without external interference. Bodily autonomy requires women’s unconditional self-determination regarding control of their reproductive capacity, deciding about each and every pregnancy they may experience. Yet sadly, over half the world’s women do not enjoy bodily autonomy.

Abortion Rights: Why are they important? 

Abortion rights are essential to bodily autonomy and central to reproductive rights.

To understand why, it’s helpful to examine the potential for pregnancy during women’s time of reproductive capacity,* often referred to as “childbearing years,” a problematic term we’ll examine shortly. It’s important to note upfront that worldwide, half of all pregnancies are not planned. This happens for a range of reasons, including birth control failure, birth control sabotage (e.g., man removes condom), birth control is unavailable, and the prevalence of sexual assault, rape, and incest. Additionally, society does not make men responsible for their sperm, and does not seriously entertain policies or practices that limit male fertility. 

Spontaneous abortion, commonly known as miscarriage, happens within nature. Miscarriage is not planned or wanted or done by choice; it’s a spontaneous result of the interaction between the developing pregnancy, the person’s body, and environmental factors.

Abortion, on the other hand, is intentional, purposeful, planned, and chosen. 

A look at “childbearing years” terminology reveals a lot about the reproductive responsibility women take on. A woman enters the “childbearing years” or “reproductive age” at puberty. Depending on what source is used, the childbearing or reproductive years are defined as 15 to 44 years of age, 15 to 49 years, 18 to 44 years, or 18 to 49 years. These vastly different definitions are troubling, since it means it is difficult to compare data collected using different parameters.

Even more troubling is that none of these ranges is appropriate for 2025. The lower age should be no higher than 12 years, the US national average age for menarche, and 44 years is too low for current childbearing realities, with women having children in their 40s. (The author understands that not all women have a uterus or are able to conceive, and not all people who can get pregnant are women. Trans men may retain the ability to get pregnant. In this essay I refer to women and pregnancy with this understanding in mind.) Even 12 may not be an early enough age to consider. The global trend of early puberty has been noted with alarm; some children are experiencing puberty as early as age 7 and menstruation by age 8.

I am exploring this seeming tangent about childbearing years and ages and standards as a way of underlining the challenge of knowing how many people in the United States have been directly and quite possibly immediately affected by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the subsequent criminalization of abortion.

We can examine some numbers at our disposal regarding women of childbearing age in the United States. “March of Dimes” reports data stating there were 65,974,992 women between the ages of 15 and 44 in 2023. So we can say, conservatively, that currently there are at least 65 million women of childbearing age in the United States. 

What does pregnancy mean for them? Looking at the reproductive potential of women of childbearing age, and doing the math using the 15-44 years range, we discover that the “childbearing years” of a woman in the United States are at least 29 years. Most women’s cycles are every 4 weeks, though it varies considerably. That makes for approximately 13 cycles per year, for a total of 377 cycles in the childbearing years, or hundreds of potential chances to become pregnant, to have one’s life changed irrevocably if the pregnancy is unplanned, unwanted, and/or unsustainable.

I have wracked my brains to come up with something that could have an impact in any way comparable to an unwanted pregnancy in the lives of most persons who do not get pregnant, i.e., men. What I came up with was job loss, divorce, forced dropping out of school, loss of housing, imprisonment, disabling injury, or serious illness. I quickly realized that even if a person who does not get pregnant experiences a number of these events, it is unlikely they would experience such life-changing events repeatedly.

The second unsettling realization is that a pregnant person could experience any of those same events, in any single pregnancy. Indeed, a pregnant person with an unplanned and/or unwanted pregnancy could lose their job, be forced to quit school, lose their home, have a serious injury, or suffer a life-threatening pregnancy-related illness, as is the case for many Black women. They could also lose their life as a result of an unsafe abortion, or become imprisoned for having a miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal death, or an incomplete miscarriage requiring medical attention.

Globally, at least 68,000 women die from unsafe abortions annually, making it one of the leading causes of maternal mortality. In the United States, punitive abortion laws increasingly are leading to deaths of ailing pregnant women who are refused care by intimidated health care providers and institutions frightened to intervene.

A woman may in their lifetime experience many times when they face an unwanted pregnancy that could seriously and potentially negatively impact their life and liberty. 

That is why abortion rights are central to reproductive rights. Abortion is needed as an essential part of health care for women, consistently and over a period of decades. It is not a trifling, rare, or dismissible need. Abortion must be an ever-present and realizable option for women for half their lives. It is the keystone of reproductive rights and women’s health, and a foundational right among women’s rights. 

The indisputable biological reality is clear: as long as there is pregnancy, there will be abortion. Whether abortion is safe, accessible and legal is a matter of social and political reality.

Of course women also need a wide range of other reproductive rights, because women’s lives are directly and profoundly affected by practices and policies that impact the body. Other reproductive rights women need include: access to quality health care; safe, effective, and accessible contraception; safe and carefully monitored pregnancy; safe birth with options chosen by the birthing person; postpartum mental health care; access to reproductive technologies to treat infertility; access to reproductive technologies to enable LGBTQ parenthood; affordable infant and child care; culturally competent parent education and support; and freedom from child removal, forced adoption, and forced sterilization.

Medication Abortion 

One of the ways women have responded to the Dobbs decision is through efforts to expand access to medication abortion. This growing movement educates women about how to use abortion pills for a self-managed abortion, and how to obtains pills through options that include telemedicine and shipment of pills from Europe, Mexico, and other countries.

Medication abortion has been available worldwide for over two decades. It’s on the approved medicine list of the World Health Organization, which views abortion as an essential aspect of health care. It has been used in the United States since 2000, and as of June 2022, it made up 54% of all abortions in the United States. Medication abortion is a safe and accessible method of ending a pregnancy, and can be used up to 12 weeks. Abortion pills are helping women who live in states where abortion has been banned or restricted.

Abortion, Sterilization, and Population Control 

It is not possible to talk about abortion without talking about sterilization. The same forces and laws that limit abortion have historically been quick to promote sterilization for low-income women of color who, since the passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1976 outlawing the use of federal funds for abortion, have been denied access to abortion. The horror stories of Puerto Rican, Black, Chicana, and indigenous women who were sterilized without their knowledge or consent are an echo of the Tuskegee experiment and other US practices here and abroad that have violated the bodily autonomy of individuals and the sovereignty of peoples.

Population control has been touted as an effective response to numerous global problems, including climate change. Shifting the responsibility for our damaged atmosphere from the fossil fuel industry and global corporations to women and their families is a cynical and doomed approach. Making family planning education and methods available to people who have not had access to them can be a welcome contribution to individuals, communities, and nations, but only when such programs are voluntary and without economic or social coercion.

Reproductive rights, abortion, and the climate crisis 

The climate crisis is the human race’s existential challenge now and for the foreseeable future. It requires the attention and participation of all who live on Earth.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade stymies that participation, both by its direct harmful impact on millions of women, and by tainting the image and influence of the United States. The end of Roe has caused alarm around the world. The political direction represented by the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade has given fuel to rightward trends in Europe, India, and Latin America, and threatens reproductive rights globally. This trend is entrenched in climate denial and the refusal to respond to the climate crisis, as was made painfully clear with the inauguration day executive order declaring the US exit from the Paris Agreement.

The climate crisis requires women’s full participation on the community, national, and world levels. But women are disadvantaged in this regard. We know that women are more likely to be negatively impacted by natural disasters, given multiple family roles and scant resources. Women are forced to migrate due to climate change’s impact on crops, food supplies, and habitability of regions scorched by heat and drought. A serious problem migrant women experience is violence and sexual assault. The challenge of managing a family in the midst of such violence, in the turmoil of climate change, underscores the need for reproductive health care that has abortion at its core.

The benefits of abortion access accrue beyond the individual. For communities, abortion access means less strain on health systems, less poverty, fewer maternal deaths, and more opportunities for children. For countries, abortion access means less strain on public resources, lower rates of teen pregnancy and marriage, and more people working, with subsequent prosperity and a reduction in crime.

Women’s leadership in the climate crisis 

Bodily autonomy, with abortion access at its core, can help create the conditions for the flourishing of women’s leadership in the battle to address climate change.

We have an impressive history that demonstrates women’s leadership in defending Earth and confronting global warming. From Rachel Carson to Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai, women have led the way to greater awareness and action defending the environment. Greta Thunberg’s defiant leadership helped launch the global movement of youth demanding changes to address climate change. Brave indigenous land defenders like Berta Cáceres have defied corporate threats and paid with their lives. Today Nemonte Nenquimo of the Waorani people leads efforts to save the rainforest in Ecuador from corporate destruction that would devastate her people and damage the lungs of the planet. By supporting and defending abortion rights for women, we help clear a path for the Wangaris, Gretas, and Nemontes of the future. 

Conclusion 

All humans need to come to terms with the realities of climate change and consider what they will do about it in their own lives. Supporting the ability of women to participate fully in fighting the climate crisis, and offer indispensable leadership to it, is critical. If you are up against a formidable opponent and half your team is handicapped, you are not going to win.

Abortion rights are not a “women’s issue” that can be dismissed. They are not “simply” a health issue. Abortion rights are a requirement for women. Just as the fight to address the climate crisis is an existential battle, so is the fight for women’s freedom to engage in that battle. When we defend abortion rights it is everyone’s future we are defending.

What, then, do reproductive rights have to do with confronting the climate crisis? 

Everything!

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References 

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