[There was never any reason to be complacent about the end of
legal abortion, nor should we think that the impact of the Supreme
Court’s latest ruling will be muted.]
[[link removed]]

GETTING REAL ABOUT THE POST-‘ROE’ WORLD  
[[link removed]]


 

Scott Lemieux
June 24, 2022
The American Prospect
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ There was never any reason to be complacent about the end of legal
abortion, nor should we think that the impact of the Supreme Court’s
latest ruling will be muted. _

Demonstrators gather outside the Supreme Court in Washington in
anticipation of a ruling on abortion rights, June 21, 2022., Patsy
Lynch/MediaPunch/IPX

 

The Supreme Court has overruled_ Roe v. Wade _and _Planned Parenthood
v. Casey_. The ending of the 49-year period in which a woman had a
federally protected right to terminate a pregnancy before fetal
viability was inevitable as soon as Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth
Bader Ginsburg on the Court. But while denial about the outcome is now
functionally impossible, complacency about what overruling _Roe_ means
remains a potentially dangerous problem. Fighting the coming onslaught
of the coercive policing of women’s bodies requires being clear-eyed
about what will happen when _Roe_ is overruled, some of which is
indeed already happening.

Complacency about what a post-_Roe_ world will look like has long been
something of a cottage industry
[[link removed]] among pundits and
commenters, predominantly from affluent men in blue-state urban areas
who are least likely to be directly affected by the abrogation of
reproductive rights. This tendency has not vanished—the comedian
Bill Maher recently asserted that “we’re not going back to 1973”
when _Roe_ is overruled, earning an approving shout-out
[[link removed]]
from Fox News. Perhaps one should only expect so much political
insight from a comedian, but Yale Law’s Akhil Reed Amar sounded
[[link removed]]
a similar note in _The Wall Street Journal_, providing hollow
reassurances that overruling _Roe_ won’t really be that bad. This
kind of complacency from nominally pro-choice elites has deeper roots
in American political culture.

One striking example of this comes from the 2014 midterms, a crucial
step in the overruling of _Roe_, because Republicans were able to take
the Senate that year. When Justice Antonin Scalia unexpectedly died in
February 2016, Republicans held the seat open until after the
presidential election, which was ultimately won by Donald J. Trump.
Looking back, the 2014 midterms, derided as meaningless at the time,
were just as consequential as any in recent memory.

One candidate who stressed that one potential consequence of the
election was that _Roe_ could be overruled if the GOP prevailed was
Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, who was in a tough re-election fight with
Republican candidate Cory Gardner. Udall’s forceful advocacy on the
issue was prescient, but for his pains he was derisively labeled
[[link removed]]
“Mark Uterus,” not only by Republicans but by multiple ostensibly
neutral reporters. Gardner won, and voted to confirm all three of the
justices nominated by Trump who are part of the anti-_Roe_ majority.

The mocking of Udall as a hysterical scaremonger for talking too much
about abortion rights is revealing in multiple ways. First of all,
there is the transparent sexism in suggesting that it’s overreaching
to emphasize rights that mostly protect women, made especially
apparent by the puerile nickname. The idea that it’s somehow gauche
to focus too much on reproductive rights is particularly remarkable
given that coverage of the 2014 and 2016 elections was dominated by
Republican-generated pseudo-scandals about a virus
[[link removed]]
that killed zero Americans and one candidate’s email server
management
[[link removed]],
respectively.

Also implicit in the “Mark Uterus” incident, however, were two
additional forms of complacency. First of all, the survival of _Roe_,
despite longtime control of the Court by justices nominated by
Republican presidents who nominally opposed it, created a narrative
that was enormously beneficial to Republicans trying to win elections
in purple or blue states, like Gardner and Maine’s Susan Collins.
The theory went that Republican elites didn’t really want to
overrule _Roe_, but were merely pretending to for the sake of
pandering to their base. This narrative was always false; the survival
of _Roe_ was always a highly contingent fluke
[[link removed]],
the product of several mistakes by Republican presidents. (Ronald
Reagan didn’t want or expect Robert Bork’s nomination to be
defeated.) We know this now, although it’s too late to change the
outcome.

The other related form of complacency, thinking that the effects of
overruling _Roe_ won’t be all that bad even if you support
reproductive rights, persists. There is a frequently made
[[link removed]] argument, not just
[[link removed]] by
opponents of _Roe_, that the abortion issue has become difficult and
highly polarized _because_ of the Supreme Court’s intervention. With
the Court exiting the arena, it should be possible to reach stable
compromises acceptable to the majorities of each state, and the
national pro-choice majority should be in a strong position to succeed
in most contexts.

The idea that _Roe_ was responsible for pro-life mobilization is not
true [[link removed]]—there was in fact
substantial and powerful opposition to state reform efforts before
1973. Subsequently, the idea that the abortion issue is about to
become less divisive or less prominent in American politics is a
fantasy that will be disproven in short order.

Maher is right that we will not be going back to 1973, but not in the
way he intended. As Dahlia Lithwick of Slate recently observed
[[link removed]],
we will be facing a future that is considerably worse. The combination
of a more extremist opposition to legal abortion, the carceral
mentality that has dominated American criminal law since the
mid-1960s, and increased surveillance technology available to
authorities will mean far more frequent and intrusive coercion being
used against people trying to terminate pregnancies, as well as using
the full force of the law against abortion doctors. There will be more
investigations, more arrests, and more convictions. We will very
clearly see why the _Roe_ majority was right to see an implicit right
to privacy in the Constitution and to see the right to terminate a
pregnancy as being protected by it.

The post-_Roe_ world, in short, will not be one of stability and civil
compromises. It will be a world of chaos and terror and escalating
[[link removed]]
legal and political hardball. Republican-controlled states will, at
the urging of anti–abortion rights groups, engage in constant
one-upmanship: passing bans, narrowing exceptions, trying to prevent
women from seeking medical care in other states, even banning
contraceptives
[[link removed]]
like Plan B and IUDs. Women in red states going through the trauma of
a miscarriage will have
[[link removed]]
to worry about facing a hostile investigation and possibly arrest. The
next Republican trifecta at the national level will try
[[link removed]]
to pass some kind of nationwide abortion ban and may well succeed.

If any complacency about what will follow _Roe _will quickly evaporate
in the face of reality, there is the risk that it will be replaced by
a weary fatalism. Because 2022 is likely to be a favorable political
context for Republicans, the party is unlikely to pay an immediate
political price for its extremism, despite the unpopularity of
overruling _Roe_ and instituting draconian abortion bans, outside of
deep-red states. The tendency toward despair for the pro-choice
majority, which is underrepresented nationally and in most swing-state
legislatures, will be powerful.

But, like the pro-life movement (who redoubled their efforts rather
than giving up after the surprising unwillingness of the Court to
overrule _Roe_ was followed by Republicans losing the White House in
1992), supporters of reproductive rights need to take a long view. In
the meantime, legislatures controlled by Democrats need to use their
majorities to protect abortion rights and do what they can to provide
a safe haven for women losing their rights in other states. And while
the lack of urgency on the part of moderate and conservative Democrats
regrettably makes a national response to overruling _Roe_ doomed
[[link removed]]
for the time being, the national Democratic leadership needs to stop
[[link removed]] appealing
[[link removed]] for a
pro-choice Republican Party that has been gone for decades, and focus
on the radicalism of the contemporary one.

Read the Original Article at The American Prospect
[[link removed]]

* The Post-Roe World; Supreme Court;
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]