Jacinda Ardern has called out the ‘incredibly upsetting’ decision by the US Supreme Court to overturn abortion rights.
The New Zealand Prime Minister said the world needed to progress and not ‘move backwards’, after constitutional protections for abortions were scrapped in the United States.
‘Watching the removal of a woman’s fundamental right to make decisions over their own body is incredibly upsetting,’ she said in a statement on Saturday.
‘Here in New Zealand we recently legislated to decriminalise abortion and treat it as a health rather than criminal issue.
Jacinda Ardern has called out the ‘incredibly upsetting’ decision by the US Supreme Court to overturn abortion rights
‘That change was grounded in the fundamental belief that it’s a woman’s right to choose.
‘To see that principle now lost in the United States feels like a loss for women everywhere.’
Grace Tame had also weighed in on the debate, sharing a devastating detail about the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands her high school teacher.
‘A part of democracy died today. Women’s sense of freedom too. Worldwide,’ she tweeted.
‘I’d had maybe 4 periods before I lost my virginity to a 58 year-old paedophile who raped me, sometimes without protection.
‘For some our womanhood is taken from us before we even have it. And that is not a choice.’
The sexual abuse survivor’s revelation came after the US Supreme Court overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that cemented women’s constitutional right to abortion by legalising the procedure nationwide.
Grace Tame has revealed that before she was raped by her high school teacher she’d had her period just four times – as she condemned the US Supreme Court’s anti-abortion ruling
Ms Tame wrote that ‘For some our womanhood is taken from us before we even had it’ in an emotional tweet (above) about the US Supreme Court overturning the Roe vs Wade ruling
On Friday the US Supreme Court overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalised abortion nationwide (pictured, protesters in Denver, Colorado)
The ruling means states will have the power to decide whether to outlaw abortions.
A total of 13 states – Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wyoming – have created ‘trigger laws’ that will ban abortion virtually immediately following the US Supreme Court’s ruling.
It’s expected that 26 states all up are ‘certain or likely’ to ban the procedure.
This means women with unwanted pregnancies will now be forced to either travel to another state where abortion is legal, buy abortion pills online or seek dangerous illegal treatments to terminate their pregnancy.
Research shows younger women, poorer women and African-American women will likely be most disproportionately affected by an abortion ban.
Rachel Jones, a senior researcher at pro-choice research group the Guttmacher Institute told BBC News: ‘The typical abortion patient is in their 20s, doesn’t have a lot of money and has one or more children.’
Protesters in Los Angeles (above) took to the streets with flags and signs to protest the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the Roe v. Wade ruling
US President Joe Biden (above) said the fight over abortion rights ‘is not over’ and declared he would work to protect women’s right to cross state borders to seek a legal abortion
Some 75 per cent of women in the US having an abortion are deemed low income or poor, based on the country’s official poverty definitions.
This means they would likely be unable to travel to seek safe pregnancy termination procedures.
Reported abortion procedures in the US have significantly decreased in the last decade, likely due to increased access to contraception and lower sexual activity.
US President Joe Biden slammed the Supreme Court’s ruling as ‘un-American’ and said Friday was ‘a sad day for the court and the country’.
The overturned Roe v. Wade ruling means the power to criminalise abortions will lie within individual states’ jurisdictions (pictured, a protester’s sign)
Protesters in Los Angeles (above) marched to protest the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the Roe v. Wade ruling
He called the overturned ruling ‘wrong, extreme and out of touch’.
He accused the court of ‘expressly taking away a constitutional right that is so fundamental to so many Americans’ and vowed the fight over abortion rights ‘is not over’.
Biden also said he would fight to protect a woman’s right to seek an abortion across state borders.
Ms Tame is an outspoken advocate for victims of sexual assault.
She was raped and sexually assaulted by her former maths teacher Nicolaas Bester, aged 58 at the time, when she was just 15.
INDIVIDUAL STATES ABORTION LAWS
‘TRIGGER’ LAWS
The following states adopted ‘trigger laws’ that outlawed abortion virtually immediately after the Roe v. Wade ruling was overturned.
- Arkansas
- Idaho
- Kentucky
- Louisiana
- Mississippi
- Missouri
- North Dakota
- Oklahoma
- South Dakota
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Utah
- Wyoming
STATES THAT HAVE ENACTED RESTRICTIONS ON ABORTIONS THIS YEAR
- Kentucky
- Oklahoma
- South Dakota
STATES THAT HAVE ENACTED PROTECTIONS ON ABORTIONS THIS YEAR
The chart above shows a map of which American states are most and least likely to outlaw abortions
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Read more at DailyMail.co.uk