Monday night's incredible leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion revealed that conservative justices are planning to overturn Roe v. Wade. Many of us expected Roe might fall this year, but it is a shocking read nonetheless. In it, Justice Alito writes that Roe was "egregiously wrong" from the start and its reasoning is "exceptionally weak."
"[I]f the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade it will be an unjustified, unprecedented stripping away of a guaranteed right that has been in place for nearly five decades," Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement late Monday. "It would represent the most damaging setback to the rights of women in the history of our country."
Protest in Texas in 2021, via Ms. Magazine Instagram
Many SCOTUS watchers are cautioning that decision drafts go through many, many edits and that this first draft — apparently written in February — may not stand as the final decision that will likely be handed down this summer.
But as Heather Cox Richardson wrote in her Letters from an American, "the news is an alarm" and one that we must act on.
Captions: Pro-choice and anti-abortion demonstrators stage concurrent events outside the United States Supreme Court Building, Washington DC, April 26, 1989. (credit: Lorie Shaull, Wikicommons); 3/ My Body Belongs To Me sign at a Stop Abortion Bans Rally in St Paul, Minnesota (credit: Lorie Shaull, Wikicommons)
Back in December, reproductive rights attorney Kathryn Kolbert, said from the TEDWomen stage that Roe v. Wade would be overturned within the year. She also talked about what might come next, imagining political activism — she called it a "bad-ass social justice movement" — focused on not just preserving reproductive rights, but so much more.
“I’m also here to tell you that there’s hope. That we can preserve, by working together, our reproductive freedoms. And by that, I mean more than just the right to choose abortion. By that, I mean the ability to make decisions about becoming parents. All people should have that right. Whatever their race, whatever their gender, whoever they love, all people ought to have the right to decide to become parents and [have] the social supports that are necessary to raise those children with dignity and in safety. …
These rights should not be controlled by politicians. They shouldn’t be dependent on where you live or how much money you make or the color of your skin or the person you love or the pronouns you use. These are universal fundamental human rights, and they ought to be guaranteed in law, in the Constitution, so the Supreme Court cannot willy-nilly take them away.”
Abortion is health care.
Consider the consequences in terms of maternal deaths in this country which already has the highest rates of maternal mortality in the developed world.
Actually, with this projected end of reproductive freedoms for women living in the US, we will become an outlier among Western countries, reports CNN. "It would firmly counter a global trend towards freer access to abortion, and place the US in a very small club of countries that have moved to restrict access in recent years." While other countries in the Global South, notably Mexico and Colombia in the past few months, have legalized safe abortions and protect women’s reproductive freedoms, we move closer to the world Margaret Atwood so brilliantly and disturbingly describes in “Handmaid’s Tale”...a world that is not the future, but the fast evolving present that looks more and more like our dark past.
I never imagined that I could be reliving that time when young women like myself, struggling to get an education and plan a future, faced an unplanned and at the time, an unwanted pregnancy (no birth control pills then either!), and would have to again seek out an illegal and likely unsafe abortion. I chose to become a mother, and I can’t imagine life without my son. But I don’t want his daughter or anyone’s daughter, granddaughter, wife, sister or any young women coming of reproductive age to face the same terrible choice I faced, along with millions of others, the dilemma of what is really no choice at all, because of a loss of the hard fought for reproductive rights.
I am preparing, sadly but with sustained passion, for the frontline struggles we face to reclaim these rights as essential to the full equality for women which I believe is also essential for a healthy, sustainable family, community, country and world.
We are the majority.
According to an ABC/WashPost poll published Tuesday, by about a 2-to-1 margin, Americans say Roe v. Wade should be upheld rather than overturned.
We will not accept minority rule on reproductive rights or on any other human right.
We will not be quiet, and we will not go back.
We must rise.
Onward!
- Pat
