Dear John,

This week we learned the Supreme Court has set December 1 to hear oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — a case that reproductive rights advocates say will determine the future of abortion rights in the U.S. At issue in the case is Mississippi’s ban on nearly all abortions after 15 weeks, before fetal viability and in clear violation of the permissible government restrictions established by the Court in both the Roe and Casey decisions. 

So much hangs in the balance: Mississippi has asked the Justices to overturn nearly 50 years of precedent in the Roe v. Wade decision, arguing that it’s state lawmakers who should decide how abortion should be regulated. Given the Court’s unwillingness to stop the unconstitutional Texas 6-week abortion ban from going into effect, advocates are fearing the worst. 

Mississippi has been a case study in the power of American extremism to threaten women’s legal rights and autonomy. As Shannon Brewer, the director of Jackson Women’s Health tells Ms., none of the clinic’s five physicians live in Mississippi, and instead all must fly in from out of state because of harassment and threats to their safety and lives. Anti-abortion activists stand outside the clinic day after day, writing down the license plate numbers of those who enter — patients and staff alike. 

In their amicus brief filed in the Dobbs case, Feminist Majority Foundation, the National Organization for Women, Southern Poverty Law Center and others, countered Mississippi’s effort to reframe the abortion debate as a “mere ‘controversy’ over a ‘contested policy issue,’” detailing the history of anti-abortion extremist violence in Mississippi and nationwide, and accusing Mississippi of ignoring the “dark stain [of anti-abortion violence and threats] on the post-Roe history of abortion in America.” You simply cannot call violence at this scale — and the increase of vigilante violence that will occur under Texas’s new law — a “controversy.”  

If you want to learn more about Jackson Women’s Health Organization — Mississippi’s last remaining clinic — join now to get the Fall issue of Ms. delivered straight to your mailbox, where we take you inside the clinic at the heart of this year’s Roe debate. 

We’re reminded by this year’s challenges to Roe that no matter how many gains women and girls have made over the years and decades and centuries, and no matter where you are in the world, men in power still can and will seek to control women’s autonomy and self-determination. This is not a non-western phenomenon — but neither is protest: fighting for your rights is a universal human directive in itself. 

In the new Fall issue of Ms., Dr. Sima Samar reminds us that “[h]uman rights and women’s rights are not ‘Western values.’ They do not belong to the West. They are universal values. As laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, human rights are universal for everyone, everywhere, regardless of nationality, race, gender, religion, locale or political system.”

Whether it's the right to an abortion, or the right to attend school, we stand in solidarity with women and girls everywhere who will continue to fight for what is right. 

For equality,

Kathy Spillar
Executive Editor