The event doesn’t occur in a courtroom or on a balance sheet it occurs inside her body. The state compelling a person to be pregnant is not like compelling her to pay taxes. Abortion has so frequently been spoken of as a “high stakes” or “hot button” political issue that it is easy to lose sight of the foundational dignity that the right provides to women and others. And some will call their state representatives and urge them to adopt the most aggressive pro-choice laws possible, in advance of what is coming.īut none of this changes the fact that the reversal of Roe will come at an intolerable human cost. Some will call their senators, and demand that the US Senate seize upon this moment of popular outrage to abolish the filibuster and pass the Women’s Health Protection Act before the moment fades and it’s too late. Still others will spread the word about organizations like Aid Access, which mails abortion pills to women in the US from abroad. Others will donate to the abortion funds that will be in dire need of support as costs and demand soar. And many of them will seek and provide abortions, whether the court likes it or not, in accordance with this higher, more noble law. Of course, legal rulings aside, American women do not derive their moral right to control their own bodies from the US supreme court they derive it from their human dignity. Some of those who make the other choice, and help their patients live, will be arrested.Īll of this will create legal precedents that erode American freedom, making life more burdensome, more brutish and less safe. As doctors face patients with life-threatening pregnancy complications, many of them will not know what they are legally permitted to do, and in fear, they will let their patients die. As activists send abortion pills through the mail, aggressive searches and seizures of packages and personal belongings will become more frequent.Īs women find ways to end their pregnancies, many of them will be arrested on criminal charges and some of them will be convicted.
As women cross state borders for care, red states will try to limit interstate travel. The sudden illegality of abortion in most states come June will also create new legal landmines that will rapidly erode other individual rights.
They aim to hurt, punish and narrow the lives of Americans in many more cruel and inventive ways. The end of legal abortion will not be where the court’s reactionaries stop. This an interpretation that, if carried to its logical conclusion, would eradicate many of Americans’ other rights that the court has recognized based on so-called substantive due process concerns, among them the right to contraception, the right to gay marriage, and the decriminalization of gay sex. Photograph: Stefani Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images Pro-choice activists gather at the US supreme court in Washington DC after a leaked draft of a majority opinion that would shred nearly 50 years of constitutional protections on abortion. It articulates a rigid and unchanging vision of individual rights, one in which only those freedoms with robust historical precedent and explicit enumeration in the text of the constitution will be recognized by the court.
The opinion does not just overturn Roe and Casey it expresses outright contempt for the notion that the constitution protects bodily autonomy for women. But Alito’s draft opinion nevertheless represents about as odiously maximalist an approach as the court could have taken. In a way, the leaked opinion didn’t tell us anything we did not already know: these are the last days of reproductive freedom in America, and most states will soon ban abortion outright, or restrict it so onerously that it is inaccessible within their borders. It was a joke, a festival of misogyny, an unserious legal formality providing a gossamer of legitimacy for a preordained outcome. Kavanaugh rattled off long lists all the decisions that the court had overturned in the past. The hearing, whose audio was live-streamed to the public, turned into a carnival of delusional hypotheticals and nodding insistence on the triviality of precedent.Īmy Coney Barrett asked why women needed abortion, now that “safe haven” laws allowed for new mothers to surrender newborns without being arrested. Feminists, meanwhile, were more consistent in measuring the depth of the right’s commitment to sexism and more perceptive in understanding the implications for other areas of the law in a world without Roe.īut after oral arguments on 1 December, even those pundits who were most committed to their performance of sophisticated calm had to admit that there was little doubt that this would be the outcome.