I was born 10 months after the Supreme Court upheld a woman’s right to obtain an abortion in the 1973 landmark case of Roe v. Wade.
If, God forbid, I’d ever been raped in an alley, on a date, by a family member, or heck, a priest and conceived a child, abortion was a medical decision that was mine to make. I started having sex in my early 20s, and if my birth control failed and I became pregnant, I would have ended it. An unplanned pregnancy would have ended my career. To have a baby you want is a blessing. To have a baby you don’t want is a curse. Having the option used to be American. It’s not anymore.
The Supreme Court’s egregious 6-3 decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization released Friday morning overturned Roe, snatching my constitutional right to end a pregnancy from me. It’s now up to state legislators to determine if abortions are legal in their state. Trigger laws in 13 states immediately outlawed abortions and Republican lawmakers in 13 more states — most in the south and Midwest — are poised to impose their will on if, when and how a woman can terminate a pregnancy.
Gov. Tom Wolf promised to protect women’s right to chose in Pennsylvania as long as he’s in office, but his term ends in January and the state’s Republican-led legislature is lining up bills that will roll back reproductive rights.
The Dobbs decision marks first time the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled a federal law that guaranteed the personal freedom of such a large swath of American citizens. It also signals how the Court intends to handle settled law, cases that have been on the books so long they define the American experience. Some of these laws impact access to contraceptives (Griswold v. Connecticut) and marriage laws (Loving vs. Virginia,) especially for people who are gay (Obergefell v. Hodges.) It doesn’t seem to matter to the justices that the majority of Americans approve of the laws the way they stand. According to the Pew Research center, 61 percent of Americans thought Roe should remain law, the Republican party continues to do as they please as they redefine what it means to be an American citizen and play God with our lives.
I am beyond petrified. I’m not nostalgic for previous decades. I was writing columns since the late ‘90s advocating for Black people and women’s rights. But privacy rights, especially those that guaranteed I had agency over my reproductive health, were a part of what it meant to be American. That’s just not true anymore. Women coming behind me — especially those who are Black and brown — are now at a disadvantage, left with a country that is less equal. The ruling states says it is most important that a woman who gets pregnant carry the fetus to term. It doesn’t matter if she can’t afford it, or she may die in the process, or she just simply doesn’t want to.
“One of the things I find the most distressing about this is the voices and the experiences of women and girls are totally absent,” said Tobias Barrington Wolff, the Jefferson B. Fordham professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. “This opinion doesn’t even try to take seriously what it would be like for young women to suddenly live in a world in which they are trying to make decisions about their relationships, education and professional lives and they won’t be able to make those same decisions about their reproductive lives.”
Abortion rights advocates and politicians point to precedent. We’ve had generations of women like me, who factored the right to chose how motherhood would work into their life-plans. “What the court says here,” Wolff said is that “precedent is important only in part that people can rely on it. What the court thinks matters in concrete forms of reliance applies only to property and contract rights.” And Justice Alito wrote since abortion isn’t explicitly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, it shouldn’t be protected by it.
When women were property — whether as wives or enslaved — men had the final say on all of her life’s decisions, including choosing motherhood, and getting an education. It wasn’t until the 1970s that a women could get her own credit card. And, according to the 2020 U.S. Census, women still only earn 83 cents for every dollar a man makes.
In the 50 years since Roe, women have made momentous strides toward equality. We are more likely to leave abusive relationships, finish our education and live independently. This is not because we have stopped having sex or or men have stopped forcing themselves on us. It’s because we have the freedom to chose the way our lives unfold. When politics gets in the way of basic personal freedoms such as when to become a parent, society is in grave danger.
“What it does is strengthen the social arrangements where men are the ones who have options,” Wolff said. “Men are the ones who are able to exercise those options with greater freedom.”
In the Dobbs opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito he called Roe a bad law and in his footnotes, he cited statistics suggested Black women were its victims, citing CDC data that 38% of all women in the U.S. who had abortions in 2019 identify Black.
Alito didn’t address any of the other inequities Black women face: that, according to the most recent U.S. Census data, Black women are paid 36% less than white men and 20% less than white women. Black women are also five times more likely to die in childbirth, and some of us are more prone to health conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes that make pregnancy more dangerous. Plus, many Black women die in childbirth because doctors don’t take our complaints and concerns seriously To Republicans, pay equality and healthcare equity only matter to fetuses. God help them when they are born.
“This is very scary to me,” said Loren Cahill, 29-year-old Black woman, a PhD and assistant professor at Smith College’s School of Social work who also serves as a scholar-in-residence at the Colored Girls Museum in Germantown. “I’ve always had agency over my body. And to lose this agency, seemingly over night, it just seems unfair.”
In this new America, women could likely face criminal charges if they make the very personal decision — and hard choice — of ending a pregnancy. Smart phone apps like Flo, that track a woman’s menstrual cycle can, and likely will, be dragged into court. And citizens in many states, like Texas, are encouraging citizens to turn women over to the police who are suspected of having abortions. It is reminiscent of the laws that encouraged citizens in states like Texas to alert authorities upon learning that Black people could read. But I can’t do anything if someone sits next to me on a train without a mask in the middle of a world-wide health pandemic, or brings a gun into a public park.
This is a well orchestrated plan to roll back abortion rights, as well as many of the rights that are fundamental to Americans, and protected under equal protection said Kadida Kenner , the CEO and president of the New Pennsylvania Project and co-chair for Pennsylvania arm of Why Courts Matter.
The Trump administration, Kenner said, stacked the lower courts with conservative judges including several who “would not conform the correctness of the Brown v. Board of Education” citing the 21 judges including Pennsylvania Western District Court Judge Nicholas Ranjan. What will happen, Kenner said, is that hard-fought rights like same-sex marriage, access to birth control and equal access to education (Brown v. Board of Education) that were once celebrated because they stood as proof America was on track to becoming a fair company for all are in danger of being struck down. It is possible we will become a country where the minority controls the joy of the majority.
Now Justices, like Alito, are using the courts to what they are calling corrective measures that change laws that once protected all citizens, but are especially important to Black people.
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court decided Thursday in the case Vega v. Tekoh that police officers cannot be sued under the federal civil rights law for failing to administer Miranda Rights, once settled under the 1966 decision Miranda v. Arizona. Individual states can now decide whether or not a person’s conversation with an arresting officer is admissible in court if his rights aren’t read to him.
Even more alarming, if a person is unaware of their right to an attorney, they may not ask for one. We know that police officers use violence on the citizens, especially Black men. This decision gives trigger-happy officers license to violate Americans’ civil rights with no accountability.
Speaking of trigger happy, in the midst of record gun violence, including a mass shooting on South Street that killed three and wounded 11, the Supreme Court also struck down a 100-year-old New York gun law Thursday that placed restrictions on carrying concealed weapons outside the home, strengthening federal protections gun owners. Meanwhile, the House on Friday voted in favor of sweeping bipartisan legislation that, among other measures, includes more thorough background checks for people ages 18 to 21. And although President Biden will likely sign the measure, once a person is cleared to carry a gun, what’s to stop them from carrying it to state fairs, malls, voting sites and government buildings if the states don’t stop them from doing so.
Republican extremists will say that Black people, women, and Democrats are alarmists. They will even deflect and call us racists for suggesting that some conservatives want to live in a country where the only people who have right to pursue happiness on their own terms are white men. But what are we left to think when so many of this year’s Supreme Court rulings reflect an America where guns were plenty, Black people couldn’t vote, and women were property?
