Roe V Wade Fallout Goes Far Beyond North America

When it comes to abortion rights, the global influence of the US may be a double-edged sword, says Borzou Daragahi

- Borzou Daragahi

Women's health advocates have been pushing the east African nation of Malawi to reform its abortion laws for years. Currently, the procedure is only available to women whose pregnancy threatens their life, and in a nation of 20 million, an estimated 12,000 women a year die from illegal abortions.

New proposed rule changes are advancing, despite setbacks and stiff resistance. But following the reversal of Roe v Wade on another continent, new abortion legislation heading to parliament could be imperilled. Malawi receives an average of $180m per year in US aid. And the government and lawmakers may decide that liberalising abortion laws could risk alienating their patrons in the future.

"We hope to see legislation going to parliament," says Sarah Shaw, advocacy director at MSI Reproductive Choices, a London-based organisation that provides women's health services across the world. "We are concerned that the Roe v Wade ruling is going to affect the passage of the bill because the Malawi government does receive quite a bit of its budget from the US."

The decades-long battle to grant American women safe access to abortion suffered a major defeat last month when the United States Supreme Court overturned the landmark 1973 decision that protected the right to have an abortion under constitutional privacy measures.

That an unelected body of religiously and ideologically motivated jurists stripped away the rights of US women is bad enough, and a giant step backward for North American society. But the reversal will also have a global impact, emboldening zealots worldwide who seek to deny women access to healthcare and control over their own bodies.