Hard to Believe, but We’re Doing Pretty Well

There’s a lot of sturm und drang about the state of abortion laws in this country — and rightly so. Several states are trying an end run around Roe by constitutionally enshrining fetal life from the moment of conception; the Supreme Court doesn’t think women are full citizens and issues decisions that sound more like 1947 than 2007; and in 87% of American counties, there is no abortion provider.

But still. Looking at the map that Good Magazine has put together (via Jezebel) of the world’s abortion laws, we’re in comparatively good shape. Most equitorial and sub-equitorial women, it seems, are screwed. One nit to pick, though: Good’s map puts the US in a category of countries (58 of them) in which abortion is permitted with no restrictions. That’s not actually true of abortion in the U.S.; it wasn’t true under the Roe framework and it’s sure as hell not true under the Casey framework that Gonzales v. Carhart virtually gutted. In the U.S., there are countless restrictions on access to abortion: waiting periods, notification laws, a federal ban on one type of abortion procedure, “informed” consent laws. The list goes on. So as much as I’m thankful for the U.S.’s relative liberalism with regard to abortion, I also think it does us no good to paint a picture far rosier than the one we deal with here on the ground.