If the supreme court hadn’t overturned it last June, undoing a longstanding precedent and inflicting untold harm to women’s well-being and dignity, Sunday 22 January would have been the fiftieth anniversary of Roe v Wade.
Over those 50 years, Roe changed American life dramatically. Abortion became a routine part of life, a resource people planned their lives around having. In contrast to its political controversy, abortion in the Roe era was – as it is now – aggressively common. Approximately one in four American women will have an abortion at some point in the course of their reproductive lives.
The figure lends credence to the pro-choice assertion that everyone loves someone who had an abortion – and the accompanying quip that if you think you don’t know a woman who has had an abortion, you really just don’t know any women who trust you enough to tell you. But part of the legacy of Roe is not just that these women you know and love have been able to have freer, healthier, more volitional lives, but also that their abortions, for many of them, are not worth confessing. For most, abortions were not tragedies to be whispered about, or life-altering moments of shame, but banalities, choices to which they were unquestionably entitled, and from which they could move unconflictedly on. But Roe is gone. Now, for many women, these choices are crimes.
It’s worth reflecting on what we had during those 49 years. While it stood, Roe offered a promise: that women’s lives need not be circumscribed by so-called “biological destiny”; that gender – its relations, performances, and obligations – might not be something that is imposed on women, but something that they take up and discard on their own terms. In the Roe era, this frank entitlement by women to determine the courses of their own lives was the decision’s greatest legacy. Individual women’s distinction and determination, or their conflictedness and confusion, or their ambivalence and exploration: once, before Roe, these parts of a woman’s personality almost didn’t matter; they were incidental eccentricities along the inevitable road to motherhood. Roe made it more possible for women’s lives to be determined by their characters, not merely by their bodies.
It is easy to speak of Roe’s impact in material terms – the way it enabled women’s long march into paid work and into better paid work, how it was a precondition for their soaring achievements in education and the professions, their ascents into positions of power and influence. So little of the vast and varied lives of twentieth-century American women could have been achieved in the absence of abortion or birth control – these women, their minds and careers, are gifts the nation could never have received if they’d been made to be pregnant against their wills, or made to care for unplanned, unlonged-for babies.
But it is less easy to discuss the sense of dignity that Roe gave to American women, the way that the freedom to control when and whether they would have children endowed American women, for the first time, with something like the gravitas of adults. Roe opened a door for women into dignity, into self-determination, into the still wild and incendiary idea that they, like men, might be endowed with the prerogatives of citizenship, and entitled to chart the course of their own lives.
This, at least, was the aspiration that Roe came to stand for: women’s freedom, their independence, their acceptance as equals in the American project. Of course, it never quite did work out that way: the Hyde amendment, which banned Medicaid funding for abortions, was passed just three years after Roe, in 1976, and effectively excluded poor women from Roe’s promise. Black women faced the dual barriers of moral judgement and eugenicist legacy – for them, often neither the choice to abort nor the choice to parent were fully free. Members of the anti-choice movement, assisted by a judiciary that became increasingly willing to do their bidding, were inventive and sadistically persistent in chipping away at abortion access, making it more expensive, more onerous, and more stigmatized than other kinds of medical care.
Even in robustly liberal states, where support for abortion was high and restrictions were few, walking into a clinic still felt like doing something illegal – there was the gauntlet of protestors outside, the receptionists seated behind bulletproof glass. If Roe was supposed to make women equals, why were they made so unequal when they tried to access its protections?
Maybe part of the answer is that Roe’s authors never intended the decision to take on the symbolic value that it did. Justice Harry Blackmun’s 1973 opinion famously treats abortion legality as a matter of the rights of doctors, a reasoning that derived from his own respect for medical professionalization, and a legal theory, en vogue at the time, that found privacy protections in the 14th amendment. Like many of his successors on the bench, Blackmun adopted pretensions to medical and moral expertise when confronted with abortion cases that he did not in fact possess. Largely absent from his reasoning were women’s claims to liberty and equality. For the court, for decades, women’s self-determination was largely an afterthought.
It was the women’s movement – feminists and pro-choice activists – that transformed Roe into a symbol of women’s aspiration to equality; it was the abortion patients, hundreds of thousands of them, who embodied Roe’s promise when they lived lives they chose for themselves.
It was this symbol that the anti-choice movement attacked, and this aspiration that the supreme court, in its ruling overruling Roe, cut down. For 49 years, Roe dignified American women; it outlawed the abortion ban, one of the most egregious attempts to dominate us by force, and it endowed us with the trust and respect of physical freedom. While it lasted, the abortion right was a promise: that the state would not commandeer our insides, could not turn our own bodies against us in order to thwart our desires. This was what the court imposed when it struck down Roe. One day, self-determination, liberty, and autonomy were women’s constitutional right. The next day, women were reduced – in their status, in their citizenship, and in their safety.
We still haven’t seen the full extent of what the overturning of Roe will take from us. We haven’t yet seen women’s numbers diminish in public life; we still haven’t grasped the human cost of the lost dreams, the damaged health, the foregone curiosity. Maybe part of the inability to mourn is related to how much we took for granted in the Roe era. As a nation, we became so accustomed to women’s reproductive freedom that we didn’t realize the extent of what it gave to us. We will miss it now that it is gone.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
