Overturning Roe vs Wade: Causing women's deaths is not 'pro-life'

With it brings the fear of erosion of women's rights, the fear that has been oft stated since Trump took the US presidency.

When asked on the campaign trail, "There has to be some form of punishment for the woman," was Donald Trump's view on the issue of abortion, hardly hiding his views under a bushel.

The pro-choice argument is so strong and so obvious that it feels it should be redundant to keep making it.

Yet here we are, constantly on a loop of repetition. And, as with so many fights for women's rights, it involves women feeling compelled to advocate for each other by sharing publicly what should be private stories.

Social media is a published record of women sharing their abortion stories for the first time. Some share reluctantly, having been emboldened by the need to protect what is vital. Others have no qualms about talking about terminations, they feel no regret and no shame.

All hope that, where rationale and facts fail, the personal will be persuasive.

It feels intrusive and unnecessary and yet this is the position women are placed in - to reveal to the world that which would otherwise be personal because what is the female body other than a public battleground?

In a real kicker for campaigners, Justice Samuel Alito's 98 page document uses feminism's successes to argue against abortion rights.

Protected reproductive rights are the only way to ensure that women have an equal role in society, whether personally or professionally, economically or educationally.

Among a laundry list, Justice Alito makes reference to US laws that ban pregnancy discrimination; updated attitudes towards unmarried mothers; welfare support; and parental leave.

The implication seems to be that woman are more supported to carry pregnancy to term and become mothers - thanks to the hard won progress of feminists - and so abortion is less critical.

As if these things fully negate the emotional, health and financial detriment of unwanted pregnancy.

The draft legal opinion looks at whether the courts or state legislature should have power of deciding abortion law. "Women," he writes, "Are not without electoral or political power". The vote, another hard won feminist victory, is a protection, he seems to be saying.

Women can campaign and rally at state level to generate political support for abortion and then go to battle at the ballot box.

But it's exhausting. A right to vital healthcare, protected in law, may become a constant skirmish, giving women even more work to do.

The draft opinion is exactly that - a draft. Perhaps it does not represent a consensus of the Supreme Court, perhaps it does. We don't know. It will not be ruled upon until likely July, but it still comes as a hard shock for American women and women the world over who are watching a push from the Christian right on the subject of their autonomy over their bodies.

While a far cry from banning abortion, the issue has been at the fore in Scotland in the past few months and pressure builds – again – on the Scottish Government to finally push forward with drafting legislation that would provide buffer zones outside abortion facilities.

These would allow allow for free speech as anti-abortion campaigners are still free to share their views about the rights of the foetus, but not where their campaigning will cause immediate and active distress to women.

It would also protect women travelling to undergo a private medical procedure from distressing protests outside hospitals and clinics but the government drags its heels on the issue still as legal advice bats back and forth.

I wrote about this in March during Lent when anti-abortion protests were being held outside the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital and was accused of being a "toytown totalitarian", which is an interesting charge against a position that allows for choice. Particularly when it is being made by someone of the persuasion that choice is wrong and that women should be forced into a life changing, potentially life threatening, situations against their will.

Another reader responded with a letter setting out his anti-abortion viewpoint and, in it, referred to me as "an abortionist".

Abortionist has a precise meaning: it is a person who legally or illegally carries out an abortion. For clarity, I have never carried out an abortion, nor would I.

But this is a classic tactic, to use hyperbole and emotive argument to try to undermine women's arguments.

Yet further argument suggested that women must largely be opting for abortions after coercion by partners and family members. No mention, of course, of those who are emotionally manipulated into carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term by cod science and religious beliefs.

Projections of the states that would ban abortion sit at just under half. This won't stop abortion, it will merely widen inequality. Women with supportive networks and financial means will travel across state lines for legal abortions.

Women with neither of those will look to charitable aid, where they can. They will undergo illegal, unsafe procedures where they can't, or have unplanned families they cannot support.

Restricting access to safe abortion is a threat to the dignity, safety and lives of women. Illegal abortions mean more women will die from the procedure. Extreme limits on abortion lead to the deaths of women in pregnancy, as in Poland soon after restrictions were introduced there, and as in Ireland.

It is, absolutely, a matter of life and death yet the woman's life rarely factors in the considerations of people who deem themselves "pro-life".

For vast swathes of anti-abortion campaigners the situation is simple: it is about reducing women to their biological function and controlling them.