Before Roe v. Wade, the term "therapeutic abortion" referred to abortions to save a woman's life.(See, for example, California in the 1960s.) Mental illness, for example, psychosis, could be a pretext for a "therapeutic abortion."
Today, Lydia Paar writes that U.S. doctors told her 18-year-old mother in the 1960s that "she 'didn't look sad enough'" to qualify for an abortion. As a result, "my grandmother had flown my mom to Japan" to get the abortion. So when Lydia, at age 20, wanted her tubes tied, her mother, "instead of telling me to 'just wait and see' or that I would 'probably change my mind' like so many other people have, she called around...Within a week or two, I had an outpatient tubal ligation procedure."
— "I Told My Mom I Wanted To Get My Tubes Tied At Age 20. Her Response Changed My Life.": "I went and talked to the only person I felt might really understand my need to not mother: my mother." Lydia Paar. HuffPost Personal. Oct 24, 2023.
There are some parallels to discourse about trans people today. Trans people are expected to report "dysphoria," i.e. severe unhappiness interfering with ability to function in life, to qualify for hormones and surgery. Essentially, if we don't "look sad enough," we're told we don't qualify. Even if we do express sadness, we're told we should "just wait and see" because we'll "probably change [our] mind."
We can just have autonomy to transition, because that is a thing that human beings can be allowed to do.
It is a thing that humans can know we want to do.
We shouldn't need to prove that we'll never change our minds — that's impossible for anyone to do regarding how they'll feel about any present-day choice from some future standpoint.
We should be allowed to make choices.
Preventing trans people from changing our bodies to reflect our sense of sex, gender and sexuality has parallels in preventing pregnant people from getting abortions. Transphobia is a cousin of sexism.
"I am located in Canada, where we're starting to have anti-trans bills that would have been mostly unheard of just five years ago. In the U.S., the fact that the courts are so stacked by Trump appointees at the federal level has been particularly daunting. We are seeing alliances between the anti-reproductive justice and anti-trans movements, which is really concerning."
— Florence Ashley, interviewed by OpenMind, April 2024
Gillian Branstetter says: "how they cast doubt on something like the Turnaway Study--the most comprehensive survey of those denied an abortion to date--is just copy-and-pasted onto the USTS and transgender care" (Bluesky, login-only, April 25, 2024)
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