Take it from an Irish woman: if US abortion rights keep slipping, dark days are coming | Maeve Higgins

In 2018, Ireland finally voted to legalize terminations. Before that condoms, divorce and abortion were illegal and shameful

I am a woman in America who can bear children, and this means that there are powerful people coming for me, with detailed and strategic plans to control my body. Sounds dramatic, doesn't it? It is dramatic, more so because it's a straight-up fact. In 2021, state legislatures enacted more abortion restrictions than in any previous year, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy body dedicated to advancing reproductive rights. Last month's decision by the supreme court to refuse to block a Texas law all but banning abortion signals that the court could well be on the way to overturn Roe v Wade, and soon.

National legalized abortion is just one part of this. Reproductive justice advocates as far back as 1994 understood that when women don't have access to abortion it generally means that we don't have access to a whole host of other rights: affordable contraceptives, comprehensive sex education, pre-natal care, even screening and treatment for a variety of diseases including cancer and HIV. This is an overall form of oppression, and I know what's happening. I also fear I know what's coming.

Maeve Higgins is a comedian and the author of Maeve in America: Essays by a Girl from Somewhere Else