The importance of providing abortions

With abortion clinics closing across the country because of restrictive state laws, a Harvard T.H. Chan School alumnus argues that it’s more important than ever to ensure that women have access to abortion services.

In a November 18, 2015 opinion piece in the New York Times titled “Why I Provide Abortions,” obstetrician and gynecologist Willie Parker, MPH ’98, wrote that women, particularly in the South, “are losing the ability to make private health care decisions” because of laws chipping away at the right. Two Southern states, Mississippi and Alabama, have just one abortion clinic left; other states have very few, meaning that women—often poor, often minorities—must travel hundreds of miles for an appointment.

Parker noted that unchosen pregnancies are likely to lead to low birth weights and other poor health outcomes, and that the death rate for black pregnant women in some parts of Mississippi mirrors that of countries in sub-Saharan Africa. “Proponents of laws that restrict women’s access to abortions often claim that these laws are put into place to protect women’s health, but the truth would suggest otherwise,” Parker wrote.

Parker recently received the Helen Rodriguez-Trìas Social Justice Award, at the annual American Public Health Association meeting in Chicago, for being an advocate for women’s health care in low-income areas.

Read Willie Parker’s New York Times opinion piece: Why I Provide Abortions