As a political scientist, Professor Melissa Haussman has been researching women’s reproductive rights in North America for at least twenty years.
She grew up in the United States, in a Republican home in Massachusetts, but changed her partisan affiliation in graduate school. She went on to study not only Roe v. Wade, but its progeny, and was active in the grassroots pro-choice movement as well as other progressive movements in North America.
In both capacities, Haussman was always acutely aware of the fragility of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
“Once Roe v. Wade was handed down, the immediate goal of the anti-abortion movement was to prevent it from becoming a nationally available service. Over the years, they’ve become more and more clever in terms of how they craft these roadblocks.”
Each year, hundreds of laws are proposed at the state level. They have two goals: to prevent access to abortion and to provoke court challenges to limit the rights articulated in Roe v. Wade and potentially overturn it, as now seems likely.