On
Abortion: A Discussion Prompted by the Pending Overruling of Roe v. Wade
May
4, 2022
On Monday, May 2,
2022, the online news source Politico published what it said was a draft
opinion of the United States Supreme Court in the case of Dobbs V. Jackson
Women’s Health Organization, written by Justice Samuel Alito, that
overturns Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that established a
woman’s constitutional right to an abortion within certain limits and the case
of Casey v. Planned Parenthood, a later case that affirmed Roe
while changing its standard for when abortion was constitutionally protected.
In his draft opinion Alito says:
We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled.
The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is
implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on
which the defenders of Roe and Casey rely—the Due Process Clause
of the Fourteenth Amendment. That provision has been held to guarantee some
rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be
‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the
concept of ordered liberty. [Cites omitted.]
Alito doesn’t think the right to
abortion meets that standard for unspecified rights, and he ignores the Ninth
Amendment’s statement that the specification of certain rights in the
Constitution doesn’t mean that the people don’t have other ones as well.
The day after
Politico published Alito’s draft the Supreme Court confirmed the authenticity
of the document as a true Supreme Court draft opinion. Chief Justice Roberts
stressed that the draft was not the decision of the Court. He started an
investigation into the leak of the document as though the leak were more
important than the appalling result Alito has reached. We now know that the
document Politico released is indeed something Justice Alito actually wrote and
said was the opinion of the court. That Alito called his draft the opinion of
the court strongly suggests that a majority of the court’s justices has voted
to overrule Roe. It seems that it will take a miracle to stop the court
from abolishing a well-established constitutional right when it issues its
final decision in the Dobbs case, which should happen next month. I am not
presently a lawyer, I do however have a legal education and practiced law for
more than twenty years before I resigned from the bar when I changed professions.
I hope I can here shed some light on issues that abound around an overruling of
Roe. Some of my discussion here is a bit technical; but we are dealing
with law here, and law can be nothing if not technical.
First, it appears
that Justice Alito’s draft opinion is wrong from its very first sentence. The
opinion begins, “Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans
hold sharply conflicting views.” That statement is factually correct, but it
completely misconstrues the function of any court. A court is a public
institution the function of which is to decide questions of law not questions
of morality.
Law may be grounded in certain fundamental moral concepts. For example, society
believes that unjustified killing of a human being is immoral, so the law makes
murder a crime. In a murder case it is not the court’s job to decide the
morality of unjustified killing. Its job is to see that the law against murder
is properly interpreted and applied in the case before it.
Justice Alito
gets his opinion off to a very bad start when he raises the issue of morals not
of law in his very first sentence. Yet that sentence is quite telling. The
conservative majority on the US Supreme Court clearly sees abortion first of
all as a moral issue not a legal one. Of course each Supreme Court justice is
entitled to her or his personal opinion about the morality of abortion or any
other issue as is any other American. What no judge may do, however, is decide
legal questions solely on the basis of that opinion. In theory at least, no
judge is permitted to decide a case merely because they agree or disagree with
some moral principle. This legal precept may be observed more in the breach
than in observance. Nonetheless, it remains part of the foundation of the entire
American legal system. Unfortunately, the first line of Alito’s opinion at
least hints that the Court is prepared to decide Dobbs precisely on moral
rather than legal grounds—their moral grounds not mine nor I hope yours.
Another, perhaps
more obscure, legal concept that is just as foundational for our legal system
is in play in Dobbs. It is the issue of stare decisis. Stare
decisis states that subsequent cases involving a legal issue that was
involved in an earlier case should be decided on the same legal basis as the
previous case that involved that issue. It is the reason the law looks to the
precedent of earlier cases when determining what the law applicable to the case
before it actually is. American law includes the idea that a law or court
interpretation of a law that has been in effect for a long time should remain
in effect unless circumstances have changed since the law came into effect in a
way that dictates that the law be changed not to be moral but to be legally
correct in the case’s actual context. Stare decisis does not mean that the
Supreme Court cannot override one of its prior decisions, but it does so
rarely. It is more likely to distinguish the case before it from the earlier
case on the basis of the facts of the case if it wishes to avoid the effect of
the earlier decision. The Supreme Court has however overruled earlier decisions
in the past.
The classic case
of the US Supreme Court overruling a prior decision, if actually only by
implication, is the case of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case
that found racial discrimination in public education to be unconstitutional. In
1896 the court decided the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. In that case a
man who was actually 7/8 white and only 1/8 Black had been convicted of a crime
under a Louisiana law that mandated separate cars on public rail systems for
“Colored” and white passengers. Mr. Plessy, despite his genetic heritage being
mostly white, was considered Black under Louisiana law.
He sat in a whites only car and refused to leave when ordered to do so. He
defended the case brought against him on the grounds that the Louisiana law in
question violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. He
was asking the Supreme Court, in effect, to overturn all of the country’s Jim
Crow laws as unconstitutional.
Respondent Ferguson, who had been the trial judge in the trial in which Plessy
was convicted and who had thus ruled against Plessy’s constitutional defense,
argued that the Louisiana law in question did not violate the Fourteenth
Amendment because it expressly stated that the racially segregated rail cars
had to be “equal.” In a 7-1 decision (with one justice not participating), the
Supreme Court upheld Plessy’s conviction. It expressly held that racially
segregated public facilities did not violate the US Constitution if they were
separate but equal. People familiar with Plessy today consider it to be
perhaps the worse decision the US Supreme Court has ever made (though I would
put the earlier Dred Scott case, which held that Black people, whether enslaved
or free, could not be citizens of the United States right there with it for
that dubious distinction). The Supreme Court case known as Citizens United
that opened the floodgates for private money to determine the outcome of
elections is another example of the court getting an issue of vital importance
just flat wrong.
By the late 1940s
and early 1950s civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, were filing
numerous cases around the country attacking the doctrine of separate but equal
in public education. This noble effort to end racial segregation in public
schools led eventually to the 1954 US Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board
of Education. In its opinion, the Court reviewed sociological and other
evidence of the harm supposedly separate but equal education was doing to Black
schoolchildren. Quite correctly, it found that harm to be substantial, leading
to among other things a sense of racial inferiority among those children. The
Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. It held separate but equal public
school systems to be unconstitutional.
Somewhat oddly, Brown ignores Plessy and does not expressly
overrule it. Nonetheless, Brown overrules Plessy in effect, and Plessy
has not been the law of the land since the Brown decision.
It is a serious
legal question whether a court should consider the consequences of its
decisions for real people or only the legal soundness of the decision. In
theory the answer is that it should only be concerned with the legal soundness
of the decision. That’s why former Chief Justice Rehnquist could say that
innocence is no reason to overturn a legally sound conviction for capital
murder, with legally sound meaning that the law was properly interpreted and
applied in the case though the jury reached the wrong verdict. (Yes, he really
did say and imply that.) In practice, courts do and really should consider how
their decisions will impact real people in the real world. That’s what the Brown
court did when it considered the harm separate but supposedly equal public
school districts were doing to Black schoolchildren. In considering whether or
not to overrule Roe, should the Supreme Court consider only purely legal
abstractions? Or should it consider what overruling Roe would mean for
real people in real life? The answer seems quite obviously to be the latter.
So could today’s
Supreme Court overrule Roe in the current Dobbs case? Yes, as a matter
of law it could (and of course there’s no one with the authority to stop the
Supreme Court from doing whatever it wants). American conservatives, most
passing as Christians, have been trying to get the Supreme Court to overrule Roe
since the day that decision was first issued. Republican politicians have been
promising their conservative base for years that they would get it done, but so
far they haven’t delivered. One of the great tragedies of American history is
that the would-be dictator Donald Trump, in his one term in office, got to
appoint three Supreme Court justices (with the acquiescence of the rubber stamp
Republican controlled Senate of course). In their Senate confirmation hearings,
none of those nominees said they would vote to overrule Roe. Some
suggested, at least in private discussions with senators, that they considered Roe
and Casey to be settled precedent. Clearly they believed exactly the
opposite.
So the Supreme
Court can overrule Roe v. Wade. The next question is whether or not it
should. Perhaps unfortunately, I must begin my discussion of that issue by
conceding a point to Justice Alito. Roe is a miserably written decision.
I read it when I was in law school between 1978 and 1981, and I still remember
how disjointed and illogical it is. It could have been written much more
directly and clearly. Justice Blackmun, who wrote for the seven justice
majority in the case, could simply have said Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965
case that I will discuss further below, established a constitutional right of
privacy, abortion is an intimately personal and private decision that the
government has no business getting involved in, so abortion is a constitutional
right. Instead he wandered all over the place with facts and arguments that
just don’t hang together. Still, Roe reached the right result if only
because, as I believe, abortion truly is a private matter and that the only
thing worse than legal abortion is illegal abortion.
So, is the fact
that a Supreme Court decision that reached the right conclusion but was
miserably written grounds for overruling it? Hardly. Consider again the cases
of Plessy and Brown. The problem with Plessy wasn’t that
it was badly written. The problem was that it had become clear that the holding
in that case was profoundly unjust. The justices of the Supreme Court in Brown
knew in a way the justices in Plessy did not just how damaging the
doctrine of separate but equal was. If we accept the legal and moral equality
of all people as the law, common experience, and simple human decency say we
must, the falsity of Plessy is obvious on its face. Plessy was
just wrongly decided, and the Brown court was perfectly right in overruling it
in fact if not in so many words.
Is Roe false on its face the
way Plessy was? To answer that question we must begin
by looking at the case on which Roe is (or at least should have been) primarily
based. That case is Griswold v.
Connecticut, a case decided in
1965, eight years before Roe. Griswold involved a constitutional challenge to a
Connecticut state law that prohibited any person from using “any drug,
medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception.” By
our standards today a more absurd, invasive law can hardly be imagined. The
case, however, was decided in 1965, and our considering a law to have been
absurd and invasive was not at that time grounds for ruling it
unconstitutional.
So how did the Griswold court reach its
conclusion that the Connecticut law before it was unconstitutional? The several
different justices who wrote in support of that ruling found a “right to
privacy” in the US Constitution. They had to concede that the Constitution does
not expressly create or guarantee a right to privacy. The word privacy does not
appear in it. Nonetheless, different justices found a right to privacy
necessarily implied variously in the Fourth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments
to the Constitution. Justice Douglas, writing for the majority, asked, “Would
we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for
telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the
notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship.” The court found,
some would say created, a constitutional right to privacy, a right which the
Connecticut anti-contraception law obviously violated.
The legal question at issue in Roe was, or at least should have been, whether or not the right to privacy
the Supreme Court established in Griswold with regard to contraception applied to a
woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy. The answer to that question appears
to me to be an obvious yes. First of all, pregnancy is of course a possible
result of sexual intercourse. Griswold found in effect that contraception is also a
matter directly connected with sexual intercourse, and sexual intercourse, at
least within the bounds of marriage, is none of the state’s business. If it’s
none of the state’s business with regard to contraception, how can it be the
state’s business with regard to abortion?
The opponents of abortion assert that fertilized
embryos and non-vital fetuses are human beings entitled to legal protection. This
claim is ultimately completely untenable, but opponents of abortion assert it so
often that we cannot simply ignore it. Abortion opponents often express this
contention by saying that the potential for life is the same as life. Yet it is
simply obvious on the face of the matter that potential is not the same as being.
We humans are all born with the potential to become or do anything that is possible
for humans and for our particular way of being. When I was born I had the potential
to become a famous concert violinist or president of the United States (not
that I would ever want to be president of the United States in today’s world). I
assume that you did too. Yet I am not a famous concert violinist. I assume that
you aren’t either. I know that unless you are Joe Biden neither of us is
president of the United States either. A person’s potential simply is not who a
person is. It is only what a person may become.
Embryos and un-vital fetuses in a woman’s
body do indeed have the potential to become human beings given the right
circumstances of their gestation and birth. Development from a fertilized egg
is after all how we all became human beings. Yet the same thing can be said of
an unfertilized egg cell in a woman’s body. Should medicine stop ovulation and menstruation
because they result in the loss of an egg that had the potential, under the
right circumstances, to become a human being? Of course not. Should all men be
required to have vasectomies because their ejaculation results in the deaths of
thousands of sperm cells, each of which had the potential, under the right circumstances,
to become a human being? Of course not. It is of course true that something
specific has to happen for an egg or a sperm cell to become a human being. A
sperm must fertilize an egg. That reality, however, just adds one preliminary
step to the process of an embryo developing through a myriad of other necessary
conditions into an actual human being.
So, is an embryo a human being? Of course
not. An embryo is a collection of cells developing in a certain way. They are
human cells, but they are not a human being. Precisely when in gestation a
fetus becomes a human being is hard to determine. We simply cannot deny that
truth. Roe dealt with this issue by using a trimester
standard. Casey affirmed Roe but changed the
standard for when a fetus becomes a human being to fetal viability, the ability
of fetus to survive outside the womb. Abortion law must include some such
standard for determining when, in a majority of but not all cases, abortion is
no longer permitted or at least is not constitutionally protected. Fetal
viability is probably the best we can do for such a standard. Perhaps
anti-abortion zealots can take some comfort from the way medical science keeps
setting the time of fetal viability earlier and earlier in the process of
gestation.
In any event, neither an embryo nor a
non-vital fetus is a human being. That truth seems so obvious to me that I did
not include this response to the claim that they are in the first draft of this
post. The
assertion that embryos and non-vital fetuses are human beings would be
laughable were the forces of the American right so vigorous in proclaiming that
falsehood as true in their attempts to assert governmental control over women’s
bodies and their decisions about sex and pregnancy. They are not worth
considering further here.
What, after all, could be more personal,
more private, than a woman’s decision of whether or not to carry a pregnancy to
term and deliver a baby? I can think of nothing that is. The question of
pregnancy involves the most personal, private parts of a woman’s being. It’s
her body, her mental health, and her financial wellbeing, among other things,
that we’re talking about here. It seems to me obvious that the state has no
right to tell a woman what she must and may not do with regard to the internal,
private functionality of her own person.
There is another important consideration
here. As noted above, in Brown the Supreme Court considered the harm
separate but (supposedly but not really) equal public education was doing to
Black schoolchildren. It was perfectly appropriate that it do so. The court’s
finding that the harm was substantial played perhaps a decisive role in the
Court’s finding separate but equal public school systems to be
unconstitutional. There is a parallel issue in Roe. What, the court must
ask, are the negative consequences for women from a ban on all or most
abortions? Tragically, the answer to that question is not hard to find in our
nation’s history before Roe. The illegality of abortion in many states
before Roe did not stop abortions. It only stopped
legal abortions. Illegal abortions were common. They may on occasion have been
performed by qualified medical professionals. In a great many cases, however,
they were performed by con artists who had no business or right to perform any
medical procedure on anyone. Many, many women who had such abortions became
seriously ill with infection and bleeding. Some needed surgery from a qualified
physician to repair damage the hack who performed the abortion had done to
them. Some lost the ability to bear children altogether. Some died. Some women
tried to induce abortion themselves, an inherently very dangerous thing to do.
A metal coat hanger became a symbol of the harm illegal and self-attempted
abortions could do and far too often did to desperate women.
Only the woman who is pregnant can know what
it would mean to her to bear and carefore a child. So many things go into
answering that question. The woman must consider: Am I psychologically able to
raise a child? Do I want to be a parent at all? Of if she already is one, which
many women who get abortions are, what would adding a new child to her family
mean for her and the family? She must ask: Can I afford a child? Or another
child? Those are all private questions with private answers that only the
pregnant woman can give. The state, it seems obvious to me, has no business or
right to interfere with anyone’s answers to them for herself and the
conclusions she draws from them.
Pregnancy of course often occurs between two
people who love each other and want to have a child together. Many of us have
been blessed to have that situation in our lives. Yet pregnancy also occurs in
far, far less ideal circumstances. It is often unintended. No contraceptive
device or product is one hundred percent effective. Sometimes the circumstances
leading to an unwanted pregnancy are far worse than a failed contraceptive.
Unwanted pregnancies occur as the result of rape and incest. Some state
statutes have exceptions to a ban on abortion for those tragic cases, but many,
including many created very recently in anticipation of Roe being overruled, do not. What business or right does the state have to
tell a fourteen year old girl raped by her uncle and therefore pregnant that she
must carry the fetus to term and become a mother while she is still a child
herself? Absolutely none that I can see. It would very likely damage a female body
that is too young to bear the strains of pregnancy. Forcing this young victim
of rape and incest to carry a fetus to birth would be cruel and inhumane in the
extreme.
So we see that there is a plethora of
reasons for keeping abortion legal. Yet it appears that the Supreme Court is
about to allow states to ban it by overruling Roe. What would repealing
the case that found a constitutional right to an abortion do to our country’s
legal landscape with regard to abortion? The answer to that question is a bit
more complex than one might expect. First of all, overruling Roe would not make abortion illegal everywhere. It would leave the
question of the legality of abortion up to the states. As I understand it,
something like twenty-two or twenty-three states currently have on their books
either a law that bans abortion or that would be triggered to come into effect
and ban abortion the minute Roe is overruled. A few other states may pass
laws banning or severely restricting abortion once Roe no longer prohibits
such laws.
Other states, including my home state of
Washington, have laws in place that protect a woman’s right to choose.
Overruling Roe would not by itself invalidate those laws. Women
in states with such laws would still have a right to abortion. Women from
states that did not give them that right could travel to states that do to
obtain an abortion. We must recognize, however, that many women who have
abortions today are quite poor, their poverty probably being one of the main reasons
they do not want to carry the pregnancy to term. Overruling Roe would leave open the possibility of women in states that do not permit
abortion going to states that do. As a practical matter, however, doing so
would be financially or otherwise impossible for a great many women. Leaving
home and traveling sometimes hundreds of miles each way to have an abortion is
theoretically possible, but it hardly solves the problems created for many
women when their state prohibits or severely restricts abortion.
Unfortunately, there is another legal issue
we must consider. There are two sides to it. I have recently heard that that
anti-abortion extremists are working on having Congress pass and the president
sign a law banning abortion nationwide. They won’t try to get such a law
enacted until the Republicans again control both houses of Congress and the
White House, but who is to say that couldn’t be the result of the 2024
election? When someone proposes such a law, the question immediately arises of
whether or not the federal government has the legal authority to enact it. Many
Americans do not know that the US Constitution was drafted in considerable part
to limit the power of the federal government. Every federal law must be based
on some constitutional provision that authorizes the federal government to
enact and enforce it.
The constitutional provision very frequently
used as the constitutional authorization for federal laws meant to apply
nationwide to private individuals and businesses is Article 1, Section 8,
Clause 3 of the Constitution known as the Interstate Commerce Clause. That
provision gives Congress the power to regulate commerce “among the several
States,” among other things. Court rulings have interpreted the Interstate
Commerce Clause very broadly. Essentially everyone in this county is engaged in
interstate commerce within the meaning the courts have given to that phrase. Unless
you have never purchased or used anything made in or having traveled across a
state other than the one in which you reside, you are engaged in interstate
commerce. Laws like the 1964 Civil Rights Act rest upon the Interstate Commerce
Clause. Without that clause the federal government would be powerless to
prohibit racial or other forms of discrimination in non-governmental
employment, housing, public accommodations, and other aspects of life the way
the Civil Rights Act does.
The federal government could probably use
the Interstate Commerce Clause as the basis for a law prohibiting any person or
organization engaged in interstate commerce from performing or receiving an
abortion, though doing so might possibly be a constitutional stretch. Surely
the framers of the Constitution never intended the Interstate Commerce Clause
to apply to medical procedures. The courts could possibly rule that the clause
is not a constitutional basis for a law banning abortion. Courts however are
impossibly unpredictable when it comes to deciding previously undecided legal
issues. My fear is that a federal law banning abortion nationwide based on the
Interstate Commerce Clause would survive constitutional scrutiny. The Senate
filibuster rule, which requires sixty votes rather than a mere majority of
fifty for most bills to pass, might be our best hope for stopping any such law
from coming into force.
There is also the matter of sexual
discrimination when it comes to banning abortion. Patriarchy and androcentrism
abound in this country, and they are very much at play in the movement to
prohibit all abortion. Yes, some women support abortion bans or at least say
that they do. Nonetheless, the efforts to outlaw abortion come mostly from men.
Sadly, many of those men are clergymen in churches that themselves discriminate
grossly against women. To many women, it feels like efforts to ban abortion are
efforts by men to assert male control over female bodies. They are quite right
to feel that way. A state telling a woman that she has no right to control her
own body is telling her that she is less than a fully equal human being. It
says we men know better than you do what it is moral and permissible for you to
do even with regard to your most private decisions. It says to women you don’t
control your body, we do. No one is trying to stop men from taking medical
steps to avoid impregnating a women like have a vasectomy. Damn it, women are
every bit the equals of us men. They have every right we have whether the law
recognizes that legal and moral right or not. It is way past time for all
Americans and American law to recognize the foundational, inalienable equality
of women and to let them make their own sexual and reproductive decisions.
The repeal of Roe could well be the
start of a very bad legal trend in this country. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr., famously said, quoting an earlier source, that the arc of the
universe bends slowly, but it bends toward justice. Over the long haul that
claim has been true of the United States as well. Our country was founded on
slavery and racism. It took far too long and far too much blood, but we ended
slavery. In 1857 the Supreme Court said Black people could not be US citizens. In
1868 we passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution that says that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the
United States and of the state in which they reside. In 1896 the Supreme Court
said so-called racially separate but supposedly equal public facilities are
constitutional. In 1954 the Supreme Court said they aren’t. We passed the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. For most of our history
LGBTQ+ people had to hide in the closet because it wasn’t safe to be out. In
2015 the Supreme Court said they have a constitutional right to same-gender
marriage. In 2020 the Supreme Court said that the 1964 Civil Rights Act
protects LGBTQ+ people from workplace discrimination. From its inception that
Act has also protected women from workplace discrimination. We’ve still got a
very long way to go to make this country actually be what it has always claimed
to be. We have, however, mostly been moving in that direction.
Overruling Roe could well be the
beginning of a reversal of that progress. Supreme Court cases like most of
those mentioned above expanded civil rights. I am unaware of any Supreme Court
case from Brown onward (or ever actually) that has taken an
existing constitutional right away from American citizens. That is precisely
what overruling Roe would do. So we have to ask: What
constitutional right will our zealous reactionaries and their compliant Supreme
Court take away from us next? Perhaps freedom of religion so they can impose an
ignorant, bigoted form on Christianity on our nation? Or perhaps freedom of
assembly because they hate protesters, especially Black protesters, demonstrating
against racist cops killing innocent Black people? They’ve already begun to
attack freedom of the press in some states with their ban the books campaigns. Will
they revoke freedom of the press so only tracts supporting their ignorance and
bigotry will be published just like only tracts supporting the Communist Party
were printed in the Soviet Union? I wish I could say it isn’t possible, but it
is.
The rights I just mentioned are of course specifically
mentioned in the Constitution, so perhaps all a reactionary Supreme Court would
let the zealots do is restrict those rights until they are essentially
meaningless though they still appear in the Constitution. The situation is
probably more serious with regard to constitutional rights recognized by
Supreme Court cases that stand on the right to privacy established by Griswold. Two years after Griswold the Supreme Court issued its decision in Loving v. Virginia. That case ruled laws against mixed-race
marriages to be unconstitutional. The case that creates a right to same-gender
marriage could very much be at risk. Indeed, there is no guarantee that the
Supreme Court might not overrule Griswold itself. Some commentators in the past two
days have mentioned that as a possibility given the language in Alito’s draft
opinion. Our country’s right-wing fanatics and their friends on the Supreme
Court and in Congress are making this a scary time indeed.
So what are we Americans who support a
woman’s right to control her own body to do? Those of us who, like me, live in
states that authorize abortion must begin by defending their state’s abortion
rights statutes with everything they’ve got against all challenges. We must vote
only for candidates for state office who support women’s rights, including the
right to an abortion. If a bill is introduced in such a state’s legislature to
repeal the state’s abortion law, we must hound our elected representatives
until they agree to vote against the bill. If the bill passes, we must hound
our governors until they agree to veto it. Sadly, none of that will matter if
there comes to be a valid federal law banning all abortion. Such a federal law
would take precedence over a conflicting state law. Until that tragic law
arrives, if it ever does, states that protect the right to an abortion will be
the only hope women deciding to terminate a pregnancy will have. I’ll suggest
this too, though I know of course that it won’t be possible for many. If you
live in a state that prohibits or unreasonably restricts abortion, move out. Move
to a state that recognizes that women are human beings with the right and the
ability to make their own decisions about their own bodies.
Those of us who support a woman’s right to
make her own reproductive decisions must boycott the states that don’t to the
greatest extent that we can. If you don’t live in one of those states, don’t go
there for any reason. Give that state none of your business or tourist dollars.
To the extent you’re able to identify them, buy no products made in a no choice
state or by a company headquartered in such a state. Economic pressure might be
able to cause some business interests to pressure their state to admit that
women are people and repeal their state’s anti-abortion laws.
The future for abortion rights and the
equality of women does not look bright in this country. It is virtually certain
that the Supreme Court will soon overrule Roe v. Wade and Casey and permit the states to outlaw or severely restrict a woman’s right
to control her own body and make her own reproductive decisions. It is
virtually certain that anti-abortion zealots will try to have abortion outlawed
nationwide through action both in individual states and at the national level. We
must all work, hope, and pray that somehow, one day, the tide of discrimination
we are now seeing in our country will turn back toward justice. May it be so.
