Abortion and Environmental Issues are Healthcare Issues

By Anya Vedantambe

When I, as a middle schooler who was living through a politically turbulent time in early 2020, heard rumors of a disease sweeping across the globe, I experienced mixed emotions. It was a disease and could of course shatter the lives of many–– but a tiny part of me was slightly grateful that the whole world would experience something, something that could draw us closer and possibly bridge political divides. 2020 me believed that disease and health issues could be the one thing that could bring the world together, because no one wanted to be sick. What happened over the course of the next two years shocked me. Mitigation strategies for the pandemic somehow became just as politicized as many of the other issues on which there were large partisan divides. Even now, in 2022, politicians argue over what I would have thought should be common-sense measures. But the pandemic is not the only health matter which has become politicized.

Many Americans take for granted breathing in clean air, or having legal control over their bodies, but these things are slowly disappearing. The disappearance is accelerated by the political divide. According to Dr. Jeremy Faust of Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston, “maternal deaths caused by abortion in the five years after Roe fell 80% compared to the five years before the decision.” In Fall 2019, detailed by Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution, the United Nations released a report suggesting that “some of the most severe social and economic damage from the rise in global temperatures could come as soon as 2040.” Surely reproductive and climate induced precautions, which will affect the whole planet, should be concerning to everyone who inhabits it. And yet, in 2019, as reported by Oliver Milman for the Guardian, a Yale study showed the climate crisis to be one of the most politically polarizing in the United States. How is it that an issue which affects so many people has become so politicized?

Sarah Murray of the Financial Times describes that the Kyoto treaty of 1997, which sought to address greenhouse gas emissions, was when the environmental aspects of climate change became intertwined with the economic ones, and the issue began to be politically charged. Once positions on the climate crisis became associated with political parties, people from both parties began to vote according to their party’s general views rather than their own ones. In the Yale study in 2019, this meant that for Democrats, addressing climate change was the third most important issue to them, just behind healthcare and environmental protection, which is also related to the climate crisis. In contrast, for Republicans, the climate crisis was the least important issue out of 29 voting points ranked. A different Yale study found that when the term “climate change” was substituted for the phrase “extreme weather”, conservatives were more likely to take personal actions to prepare for emergencies. Seeing that part of the controversy around climate change exists because people vote in line with their parties, not their views, shows us that many know what needs to be done to help our planet. Now, taking action has become another casualty of our political system.

Apart from the more well known health implications of climate change, such as those caused by pollution, climate change could have some lesser known effects. According to Kamarck, climate change could cause disease mutation, chronic food shortages, and a planet so hot that its inhabitants could die of heat. And it would, as reported by the EPA, disproportionately affect communities of color, which are more likely to live and work in areas impacted the most by it. Since the predicted worst effects of climate change could start as soon as 2040, less than twenty years away, it is imperative that our government acts now to protect our planet and our own lives. One pandemic has already destroyed communities and lives, but with climate change, pandemics could become a constant.

As climate change steadily accelerates, our control over our bodies is simultaneously threatened. With the recent Supreme Court draft leak, many, like myself, are thinking more closely about a right which I had previously taken for granted. I knew about the debate around abortion, and that it has been controversial almost since it became possible. According to Dr. Treva Lindsey, a professor of Women’s Studies at Ohio State University, the debate around abortion has existed since it became common in the 1800s. But, until a few months ago, as states took away abortion rights, and a few weeks ago, with the draft leak, I accepted Roe v. Wade as a fixture. Up until this point in recent American history, even if people didn’t have easy access to healthcare (which is another issue), they at least had the legal right to access healthcare. And healthcare is exactly what abortion is.

Though abortion might feel wrong to some, the number of mothers’ lives it has saved seems too great to simply disregard it as a moral issue concerning the fetuses. According to Dr. Jenny Faust, the legalization of abortion dropped maternal abortion related deaths by 90%. 90. Whether or not an abortion is legal clearly affects the safety of the patient. An increasingly popular saying is that ending legal abortion won’t end abortion, it will only end safe abortion. Ending legal abortion will disproportionately affect non-wealthy, non-white people, says Dr. Faust. These women are unable to travel across state lines to seek out legal abortion if it is not available in their state. If unable to travel to receive a safe abortion, they might resort to having an unsafe one, which could lead to death or serve health complications. Legal abortion thus protects the lives of mothers in non-wealthy, non-white communities.

Though the divides caused by the pandemic were disappointing, there were still some valuable points from it. Biomedical scientists from around the world put their heads together and pushed out a vaccine within a year, when it should have taken a decade. This showed us that in an emergency that takes so many lives, we are capable of finding solutions to problems when we collaborate. The pandemic is also a wake-up call for politicians, showing them that there were major issues with the current healthcare system. Like with the pandemic, we must look at climate change and abortion through the lenses of health and humanity rather than opinions. We need to get politicians who are stalling or opposing climate action or trying to take away abortion to understand that the two issues are matters of health and a matter of survival.