“The fact that all of those old, ideological hangups contributed to her death, and the fact that she and her husband were told, ‘This is a Catholic country, we can’t help you’  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

	Purvi Patel and Savita Halappanavar are two examples of the coming wars on women's bodies “The fact that all of those old, ideological hangups contributed to her death, and the fact that she and her husband were told, ‘This is a Catholic country, we can’t help you’ Kaur Republic May 6 On May 2nd, Politico leaked a draft decision crafted by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wherein, he used several racist cases in American history to talk about why cis-women shouldn’t have the right to make deeply personal decisions about their own bodies. Republicans often cite the very original form of the U.S. constitution as a basis for their discrimination against women, people of color, and oftentimes, other religious minorities. This is the same Supreme Court that outlawed Asian American Pacific Islander Immigration to the United States and used racist medical science to justify the exclusion of Asian Americans from US citizenship [see United States vs Bhagat Singh Thind]. Subscribe now With this particular case of United States vs Bhagat Singh Thind, I also want to note the influence of how racialized people and communities how to forge alliances by marriage sometimes in order to gain proximity to white power in order to simply survive in the same ecosystem as mainstream America. Thind married a white woman and so did the only Sikh member of Congress Duleep Singh Saund [D-California], because proximity to whiteness unlock benefits to racialized communities that otherwise wouldn't have the chance to exercise these rights. When we talk about abortion as well it's important to know how white supremacy works against South Asian women in addition to solidifying white power and control over communities of color. It's time that we break that cycle but also note the history that can prevent us from repeating the same mistakes. When it comes to the issues of surveillance, the police state, the involvement of doctors and nurses and the US medical system in discriminating against women of color, we see a wide in equality in the way the white patients are treated versus how black and brown patients are treated. This data was collected between 2014-2015 and due to scarce ability to adequately measure data pertaining to data on abortion within the South Asian/Southeast Asian community, not a lot of data is available. When we disaggregated Asian women by their country of origin, we found that Indian women had the highest abortion rate (30.5 per 1000 women) followed by Japanese and Vietnamese women (17.0 and 13.0 per 1000 women, respectively). The abortion rates for Chinese and Korean women (8.8 and 5.1 per 1000, respectively) were lower (Table 1). Notably, each of these rates also varied substantially from the abortion rate for Asian women overall. The research also finds that: The abortion rate for U.S.-born Asian women was approximately 1.5 times higher than for foreign-born Asian women. The direction of this relationship by nativity status persisted within every country of origin group, although the magnitude of difference varied. For example, the abortion rate for U.S.-born Chinese women was nearly twice as high as that for foreign-born women, while among Japanese women, we found a nearly five-fold difference in the abortion rate between foreign-born (8.4 abortions per 1000 women) and U.S.-born women (38.9 per 1000) Subscribe now Representataive Jayapal, the first South Asian woman to be elected to Congress shared her own story about getting an abortion and what protecting access means for her: I had a very difficult first pregnancy. My kid, Janak, who goes by they/them pronouns, was born at 1 pound, 14 ounces, at 26 and a half weeks. By all medical standards, they should not be here. They did survive, but it was rough. [They had a lot of ongoing medical issues]—everything you can imagine as a kid. I went through postpartum depression, ended up getting a divorce, and then [met] a wonderful man after that. I was one of those people who take birth control religiously and still get pregnant. My doctor said, “There’s no guarantee that you’re not going to have the same kind of birth.” [With Janak,] I ended up having an emergency C-section. [The doctor said,] “We don’t know why that happened with Janak, but it just may be that it happens again.” Janak was just a few years old at the time, maybe three or four. And I realized there was just no way that I could possibly take care of Janak and take care of myself and go through potentially the same scenario again. I really wanted to have another child, but I knew I could not do it then. Rep. Pramila Jayapal @RepJayapal If the Supreme Court strikes down Roe, who's to say they won't come after other fundamental rights, like gay marriage or interracial marriage next? May 5th 2022 43 Retweets184 Likes And the same institutions that the GOP has been fighting against such as schools, sex education, and even math, are showing themselves in the war on pregnant people. I highlight two cases of circumstances that south Asian women have gone through and that they have not been able to recover from because the systems were against them And when America was founded there was no formal religion established in the country because the founders did not want to repeat the same mistakes from the old world that they were trying to escape. The founders were also slaveowners and rapists, and while they were alive, did not have the technological, cultural political, advancements that we have now in order to best envision how this country should treat the most marginalized. Subscribe now The Constitution never mentions sex, marriage, or reproduction. This is because the political order that the Constitution established was a fraternity of free men who, believing themselves to have been created equal, consented to be governed. Women did not and could not give their consent: they were neither free nor equal. Rule over women lay entirely outside a Lockean social contract in a relationship not of liberty and equality but of confinement and subjugation. As Mary Astell wondered, in 1706, “If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves?” But the Republican party is intent on taking away the rights of women and people who can get pregnant because they have a coordinated organization of over 50 years since Roe vs Wade was passed and use the levers of American institutions to place Supreme Court Justices that would rule in their favor on anything from climate change to campaign finance. The complete decimation of voting rights in key battleground states also shows you just how intent Republicans are to shift minority rule into the main stream while the Democratic Party continues to campaign for an anti-abortion Rep. Henry Cuellar in Texas. Subscribe now In a statement released after the draft opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was leaked, President Biden responded by essentially saying that Democratic party voters should only “vote harder” to make sure that the party that controls the Congress can do its job. At a time when voting rights have been weakened to their utmost point, and have targeted black communities disproportionately, the urge to say "vote harder" after voters in Georgia sent two senators to Washington DC, only shows the failures of electoral politics. We are seeing the Democratic Party implode in real time and being unable to govern in this very crucial time. Because they do not have their caucus in line with them. It is emblematic of a issue that Democrats have been dealing with as they face record low approval ratings from younger voters that are disillusioned with the lack of student loan debt cancellation, the lack of action on climate change and the continued polarization that Senator Manchin and Sinema bring with them to Congress and obstructing the Democratic agenda. Joe Biden @JoeBiden At the federal level, we will need more pro-choice senators and a pro-choice majority in the House to adopt legislation that codifies Roe, which I will work to pass and sign into law. May 4th 2022 8,172 Retweets56,791 Likes Organizers, activists and civil society were well aware of the looming decision in Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization when it came to abortion and reproductive health, what is continuing to be shocking is the domino effect of how all of our rights start to fall after reproductive rights. In his draft opinion, Justice Alito alluded to overturning Loving versus Virginia which established interracial marriage within the United States, Griswold which legalized contraception -on the basis of a married couple’s right to privacy and not a single woman’s- within the United States among many other civil rights that have been so hard won but are at the complete mercy of an unelected nine member Supreme Court that lacks severe transparency and most of which has been appointed by Presidents who have lost the popular vote [Justices Thomas, Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Roberts, Alito, and Gorsuch]. Share Savita Halappanavar and Purvi Patel In Ireland, Savita Halappanavar died from complications that arose during her pregnancy and spurred campaigners in the country to fight harder to decriminalize abortion. Ireland refused to abort the fetus on the grounds that it violate the country’s religious beliefs. This case also demonstrates how people of different nationalities and faiths face barriers in their host country when it comes to having an abortion due to cultural and religious differences. How to navigate the dualities of where abortion is legal versus where it's not legal is also tricky. Dr. Halappanavar, a dentist, and her husband, an engineer, were living in Galway in 2012 and preparing for the birth of their first child. That all changed when, 17 weeks pregnant, Dr. Halappanavar went the hospital with back pain on Oct. 21 and doctors said she was having a miscarriage. Dr. Halappanavar was told that her fetus would not survive — but that she could not be given an abortion, her husband said. Ireland, she was told, is “a Catholic country,” and it would be illegal to terminate the pregnancy while the fetus still had a heartbeat, her husband said. After being repeatedly refused an abortion, she waited days until the heartbeat stopped. The contents of her womb were removed on Oct. 27. By then she had an infection, and she died of septicemia the following day. Subscribe now As a Hindu woman living in a Catholic majority country, the fact that Savita could not get the life-saving care that she needed because it would violate the religious beliefs of the country that she was living in shows that this is as much of an issue about bodily autonomy as it is about religious freedom and religious authoritarianism. Moreover it also demonstrates the influence of the transnational world that we live in and how belief systems shouldn’t dictate the care you get from medical professionals. As we will see with the case of Purvi Patel, South Asian women do not have an easy time navigating western health systems that discriminate against their religion, nationality and right to life. In Savita’s home country of India for example, reproductive healthcare is much more accessible [one would argue] and more recently, for single women, there are more options to getting contraceptives and abortion. According to DNA India, abortion is a legal procedure that can be performed in the country according to specific measures: It must be noted that abortion is only legal in India under certain conditions, which have been defined by the MTP Act 1971. First and foremost, abortion can only be performed until 24 weeks of pregnancy in India for some special cases, according to the MTP Amendment Act of 2021. Earlier, only married women were allowed to get the pregnancy terminated, according to Indian law. After the amendments made in 2021, unmarried women can now seek safe abortion services on grounds of contraceptive failure. The MTP Act also grants confidentiality to the person who is getting their pregnancy terminated. As per the law, the details of the woman whose pregnancy has been terminated to a person authorized by law, and any violations of this can be punishable by law. In the medical explanations during the trial, doctors took to the stand to talk about the Eighth Amendment in Ireland and what the true reasons behind Savita’s death was: Subscribe now But Sir Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, a professor emeritus of obstetrics and gynecology at St. George’s University of London who led the investigation into the Halappanavar case, suggested otherwise in testimony to a government committee. “One of the things which was holding their hands back while they were looking after her,” he said, according to The Irish Times, “was this Eighth Amendment issue because the baby’s heartbeat was there.” Ms. Barnes, the medical student, said: “It was such tragedy of epic proportions that doctors were unable to provide basic care for her because red tape tied their hands. I think what it really did was, it woke up young people, particularly young women, to how easily something like that could happen.” Dr. Halappanavar’s husband and friends gave accounts of her life and of her final days in a hospital. The public also saw videos of her full off life. Mr. O’Halloran said he believed that a deeply ingrained sense of responsibility that Irish people feel for visitors and newcomers weighed heavily on the conscience of the nation. “The fact that all of those old, ideological hangups contributed to her death, and the fact that she and her husband were told, ‘This is a Catholic country, we can’t help you’ — that really brought terrible shame on us,” Mr. O’Halloran said. This case clearly shows what happens when there are religious differences but also disregard for the life of the mother in pregnancy. It points to the white supremacy that's rooted in taking away the decision from people of color and making choices about their medical care where peoples ideologies are coming in the way of their medical care. Subscribe now How the abortion bands in the United States did not become a transnational issue and a matter of diplomatic concern for countries that have citizens with dual identities residing in countries like the United States and facing even more threats to their bodily autonomy points to the fact that this is not just an American issue but a worldwide issue. When pregnant people enter the United States they will no longer have any control over their bodies and they will have to be subjected to a Christian majoritarian government that doesn't recognize their humanity should anything happened to them during their pregnancy and during their stay in the United States. Again, there hasn't been a formal establishment of religion within the United States but as we have seen over the years Christian fundamentalists have been saying that this country only belongs to Christians and not people of different faiths. In the long term this can become a bigger issue for groups such as Muslims, Jains, Sikhs, and the Jewish community. Subscribe now Should there be a lack of recognition of other religions within the United States, it will become much harder for people to freely express their faith and be recognized as a faith that is separate from Christianity Purvi Patel Before we dive into the case of Purvi Patel here's a little bit of background about what Dobbs versus Jackson Women's Health Organization, has the potential to do to pregnant people if the Supreme Court of the United States overturns Roe versus Wade [which it seems very likely to do]: Cases like these have generally been won on appeal as the homicide and feticide statutes used were found to be inappropriate. But that’s only because, up until now, states couldn’t classify abortion as murder. Soon, they’ll be free to bring such charges against doctors and patients. Subscribe now According to Guttmacher Institute, 26 states will immediately trigger laws that completely outlaw abortion should the Supreme Court overturn Roe. Credit: Guttmacher Institute. States in orange would immediately ban abortion in all cases and no exceptions. You can follow the Guttmacher’s legislative tracker to get real time information on where the right to privacy and bodily automony stands in legislatures across the United States. Background In its landmark 1973 abortion cases, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized a constitutional right to abortion but held that states could prohibit abortion after fetal viability—the point at which a fetus can sustain life outside the uterus—if their policies met certain requirements. Since then, the Supreme Court has consistently reaffirmed the fundamental right to abortion while also allowing new limits on an individual’s ability to obtain one. However, after President Trump appointed three conservative justices, the Court now has an anti-abortion majority. The current U.S. Supreme Court standard holds that states may prohibit abortion after fetal viability as long as there are exceptions for the life and health (both physical and mental) of the pregnant person. Under this legal standard, viability—which can range from 24 to 28 weeks after the start of the person’s last menstrual period (LMP)—must be determined on an individual basis, and determinations of both fetal viability and the patient’s health are at the discretion of the patient’s physician. Additionally, states may not require that additional physicians confirm an attending physician’s judgment that the patient’s life or health is at risk in cases of medical emergency. The Court’s requirements place decisions regarding the timing and circumstances of an abortion in the hands of the patient and, after viability, their doctor. Most states restrict abortion at a specific point during pregnancy, which normally lasts 40 weeks LMP. In recent years, however, some state policymakers have attempted to provoke a Supreme Court challenge by banning abortion before viability. Federal and state courts have consistently blocked enforcement of laws that ban abortion before 13 weeks LMP, but more than a third of states have successfully implemented “20-week abortion bans.” These bans are based on the unfounded assertion that a fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks postfertilization (an estimated date of conception), equivalent to 22 weeks LMP. Other states have enacted laws that prohibit or severely limit abortion in the second or third trimester (starting at 13 weeks and 25 weeks of pregnancy, respectively). When these measures have been challenged, courts have struck down laws with a blanket ban on abortion at a specific week or trimester, as well as those laws with extremely narrow health exceptions. However, not all of these restrictions have been challenged in court. As a result, some states still have statutes on the books that do not meet the Court’s requirements. For example, a few states have enacted previability bans, including a six-week ban in Texas and a 20-week ban in Mississippi. Some states also continue to maintain and enact new laws requiring involvement of a second physician to certify or attend the abortion under particular circumstances. The result is a patchwork of state limitations on abortion throughout pregnancy that leaves many people unable to receive the care they need Subscribe now In 2013 - just a year after the death of Savita Halappanavar- the case of Purvi Patel, illustrated the dangers of Indiana's laws when it came to pregnant people's rights. The war on pregnant women had to come to American shores under Christian fundamentalist values and incarceration system that would not hesitate to lock Patel up and throw away the key for the crime of having an abortion and growing up in a conservative home that would not accept her child and indeed have severe consequences for herself should she carry the pregnancy to term and go against conservative Hindu values. In an article written by Imani Gandy for Rewire News Group: we see just how doctors and nurses collude with police to pregnant people from getting the care they need in addition to becoming part of the surveillance state and enabling medical racism. Subscribe now In July 2013, Patel, an Indian American woman who lived at home in a conservative Hindu household, entered an emergency room outside South Bend, Indiana, while suffering heavy vaginal bleeding. She eventually admitted to her doctors that she had been pregnant and had miscarried; she told them the fetus was stillborn and that she had disposed of the remains. Medical staff at the hospital alerted the police, who went looking for the fetal remains and found them in a bag in a dumpster at a nearby Target. The police proceeded to interrogate Patel without a lawyer present while she was still in the hospital. Police also searched her cellphone, which led them to a series of text messages in which Patel told a friend that she had ordered mifepristone and misoprostol, the two drugs used in a medication abortion, online from a pharmacy in Hong Kong. Patel, who was living at home with her parents, wanted to keep the pregnancy a secret. Prosecutors claimed that the text messages made the case for Patel’s illegal abortion and felony charges. Gandy delves into the legal world of how anti-abortion forces turned their ire on doctors and patients. She writes: Feticide laws are intended to provide a remedy to pregnant people who experience pregnancy loss as the result of a third party. Indiana’s law, for example, was upgraded to a Class B felony in the wake of a 2008 shooting; a woman named Katherin Shuffield was shot in the stomach during a bank robbery. She survived. Her twin fetuses did not. Would Patel have been subjected to these farcical criminal proceedings if she were not South Asian? Certainly white women do get caught up in the criminal justice system—frequently when they are poor. But inherent biases exist when it comes to Black and brown people. As a South Asian woman, Patel may have faced anti-Asian stereotypes about son preference; there’s a pernicious stereotype that Asian people prefer boys and will terminate pregnancies if they know it’s a girl. (This stereotype forms the basis of sex-selective abortion bans that bar doctors from providing abortions if those abortions are being sought on the basis of sex.) What is interesting to note is that Imani delving to the cultural ramifications of South Asian and black and brown people when it comes to abortion, which should start to highlight more people of color instead of white women who are mainly profiled in the reproductive rights space. Subscribe now As a South Asian woman, I already know that premarital sex is stigmatized, our conversations around contraceptives are pretty much nonexistent and it's not a topic commonly discussed among families when it comes to learning about healthy relationships and seeking reproductive health care or gender affirming care. Furthermore coming from the conservative household, Patel no doubt may have faced the pressure to abort this child before her parents found out about her being pregnant which could be an even bigger issue and possibly could've resulted in an honor killing. While I cannot assume to know the circumstances of her family and I don't wanna speak for her parents, one thing is for sure, not only do south Asian women faced a heavy burden of cultural stigmas when it comes to premarital sex, we're also not allowed to talk about gender based violence that we experience because it would bring shame onto our family. We're expected to bury it and not talk about it. Whenever we do get pregnant, we do face a high price. Moreover when it comes time for men to assume responsibility for the people that they get pregnant, research is showing that homicide rates against women increase when their partners find out that they're pregnant. Age is also a factor in pregnancy-related homicide, the team found: young women between the ages of 10 and 24 are at higher risk of homicide while pregnant than are those who are older, according to the study. “It’s an age and race story,” Wallace says. In unpacking the layers of what Patel may have faced, we also see the influence of family, doctors, police, nurses, and the American incarceration system which doesn't hesitate to lock people up and never let them go. Coupled with religious and cultural factors between what America and mainstream Western culture is and Indian culture and the expectations of both, you can see how clearly South Asian women can get caught up in the crosshairs of gendered violence and the influence of patriarchy in both Christianity and Hinduism that can prevent people from feeling like they can come forward and talk about their options in terminating a pregnancy. Subscribe now My own story My journey into getting reproductive healthcare started at Planned Parenthood in Queens. I was 19 years old when I learned about my birth control options when my gynecologist went over them with me otherwise sex education wasn't something that I had been exposed to. My experience with contraceptives healed my acne and enabled me to live a much more confident life as a first generation college student at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. I was navigating my first semester through college when I was trying to figure out how to keep my acne at bay and my dermatologist recommended that I get birth control to keep my symptoms under control. I also dealt with heavy and painful periods that came with migraines that felt like the world was shattering around me. For six years, contraceptives have helped me decide the course of my life and also feel at home in my body without having to feel the vicious bite of underlying medical conditions. It also enabled me to decide what family planning would look like for me and it taught me the importance of maintaining a healthy relationship with myself and with others and leaving relationships that were detrimental for me. I have had partners who pressured me to ditch the pill when I was on it before I got Nexplanon implanted into my arm. There are times when I’ve been attempted to be coerced into sexual activity against my will and as a survivor of sexual assault, contraceptives really helped me navigate a horror that I cannot think about anymore without getting chills. I've heard the stories of other Punjabi women and learned about how the nexus of immigration, white supremacy, coming to a land getting married and not knowing when you want to have kids or when you'll be in a financial position to have kids and how they can influence your childbearing decisions. I've heard the stories of hundreds of women who have said that they escaped violent marriages and violent partners and how using contraceptives and having access to abortion helped them navigate deeply troubling times and to get them to a place in life where they can make autonomous decisions without needing somebody to sign off on these things. Subscribe now A friend told me one time that she had just come to the United States and had just gotten married and she lived in extended household with her in-laws and her husband and siblings. After having one child and having to shoulder the responsibilities of a 10 member household, she didn't feel like she was in a position to have another child so quickly. So when she found out she was pregnant with her second child, she had an abortion. Growing up in Richmond Hill, Queens exposed to me the dark side of intimate partner violence between Punjabi couples and how men [for the most part] would marry young brides from Punjab, bring them to America and isolate them from ever getting help from somebody in the case that they were being assaulted. Contraceptives and sexual activity are seldom discussed much less encouraged before marriage. She would have two more children three years later and be in a much better position to navigate those dynamics and raise children that she was ready to have. In Punjabi American households multiple generations tend to live with each other. Grandparents tend to raise their grandchildren, but what happens if you don't have that support and how do you navigate raising a child let alone two? I've also seen Punjabi women navigate deeply violent marriages but their partners where they're unable to communicate with their medical professionals because their spouses didn't allow them to learn English so that they could be the only link between communication with the outside world. Survivors of domestic violence have the most to lose with the rollback of Roe vs Wade. Well men may act like these experiences or some thing they can just shrug off these are experiences that are factored into whether women want to have children and cultural influences around childbearing and child rearing. The United States currently does not have paid maternity leave. There is no support for women who are primary caregivers to their children and who dropped off in massive numbers from the American workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic because there was no childcare available and the general responsibilities of childcare fell mostly on cis-women. Not only has the government not done anything to address this they also haven't extended the child tax credit which lifted millions of American children out of poverty in the short term but continues to leave them out in the cold as the funding has expired and polarization in the US Senate on behalf of Senator Manchin prevent any further action on re-authorizing funds. In both of these cases you can see how Ireland for example of a Catholic country did not enable Savita to have a life-saving abortion that could've kept her alive despite her families pleas for medical intervention, and you can see how the American medical system tried to weaponize the carceral system We are now entering a world where minority rule, is still prevalent even though Democrats control Congress and the White House. The future for reproductive rights looks very bleak. Subscribe now Kaur Republic is an independent newsletter covering Punjabi Perspectives on American Issues. We are completely funded by our newsletter subscribers and hope that you will consider a monthly or yearly contribution to keep the paywalls off our stories so they can remain open for learning. Follow us on Instagram| Follow Us on Twitter| Follow Navigating Politics with Navjot| Paid Subscribers get an exclusive Weekly Round-Up Newsletter| Like Comment Share You’re a free subscriber to Kaur Republic Newsletter. For the full experience, become a paid subscriber. Subscribe © 2022 Kaur Republic Unsubscribe 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104