Reprint: Abortion Rights vs Authoritarianism

 

Banning abortion is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes

Abortion rights protesters march against Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Washington, D.C., on Sept. 2, 2025. Jose Luis Magana/AP

Seda Saluk, University of Michigan

Pregnant women crossing borders to get an abortion. People who miscarry facing jail time or dying from infection. Doctors who won’t perform lifesaving procedures on a pregnant patient for fear of prosecution.

For years, this was the kind of thing that happened in Poland, Nicaragua or El Salvador. Now, it’s headline news in the United States.

As a scholar who studies the relationship between reproductive rights and political regimes, I see the U.S. mirroring a pattern that has happened in authoritarian regimes around the world. When a government erects barriers to comprehensive reproductive care, it doesn’t just cause more death and suffering for women and their families. Such policies are often a first step in the gradual decline of democracies.

Yet, the U.S. is different in a meaningful way. Here, abortion has historically been framed as a personal right to privacy. In many other countries I’ve studied, abortion is viewed more as a collective right that is inextricably tied to broader social and economic issues.

The American individualist perspective on abortion can make it harder for people in the U.S. to understand why banning abortion can serve as a back door for the erosion of civil liberties – and of democracy itself.

Autocrats target abortion first

Restricting reproductive rights is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.

From Benito Mussolini’s Italy in 1926 and Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1936 to Francisco Franco’s Spain in 1941 and Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania in 1966, the first move most 20th-century dictators made after seizing power was to criminalize abortion and contraception.

Initially, for some of those autocratic leaders, limiting access to abortion and contraception was a strategy to gain the approval of the nation’s religious leaders. The Catholic Church held great power in Italy and Spain, as did the Orthodox Church in Romania. At the time, these faiths opposed artificial birth control and still believe life begins at conception.

Restrictions on reproductive rights also aimed to increase birth rates following two world wars that had stamped out some of the population, particularly in the Soviet Union and Italy. Many political leaders saw procreation as a national duty. They designated women – white, heterosexual women, that is – specific roles, primarily as mothers, to produce babies as well as future soldiers and workers for their regimes.

Article summary: The cognitive resilience of older women

Silent X chromosome genes 'reawaken' in older females, perhaps boosting brain power, study finds

This is an excerpt from the above-titled article in Live Science. I highly recommend clicking through to read the whole thing!


Females have one active X chromosome and one dormant X chromosome in each cell. But a study suggests that genes on the dormant X get "reawakened" later in life, potentially giving the brain a boost.

Dormant genes on the X chromosome may reawaken in old age, potentially giving the aging female brain a boost that the male brain doesn't receive. This phenomenon may help to explain why, on many measures, females show a higher level of cognitive resilience in old age than males do.

There seem to be fundamental differences in how males and females age. When it comes to the brain, females have lower rates of various forms of dementia than males do, even though females live longer, on average. One exception is that females have higher rates of Alzheimer's disease than males do, although females with Alzheimer's tend to survive longer than males with the condition.

Males typically carry one X and one Y in each cell; they inherit the X from their mother and the Y from their father. Females, on the other hand, usually carry two X chromosomes — one from mom and one from dad. But each cell needs only one X to be active, so in females, the second X is "silenced," leaving only the maternal or paternal X switched on.

Among the 22 reawakened genes, one called PLP1 carries the instructions to make a key component of myelin, the fatty insulation that helps neurons send signals efficiently. It's known that mutations in PLP1 can decrease the amount of myelin in the brain, resulting in intellectual disability. It's also known that myelin can be compromised in aging and that loss of myelin function can contribute to cognitive decline.

To see if the reawakening of PLP1 might boost cognition, scientists confirmed that older female mice had more PLP1 activity in their hippocampi than the older male mice did. They artificially increased PLP1 using gene editing in both old males and old females found that both sexes performed better on tests of learning and memory after that boost.

To see if any of the findings extended to humans, the team looked at data previously collected for a large study of human brain tissue. Data weren't available for the hippocampus, but the brain tissue immediately surrounding the hippocampus showed more PLP1 activation in older women than in older men. So that hints that the same phenomenon might be unfolding in people.