Maeve Higgins: As safe abortion slips out of reach, so do our human and civil rights
Demonstrators protest outside of the US Supreme Court in Washington. Picture: AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana
On Monday night, I was hosting a comedy show with my friends. We had a solid line-up and a happy crowd. As I walked to the train, my sister texted to tell me to look at Alicia Keys' outfit. Uptown, the Met Gala was happening; a fundraiser for The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Keys wore a silver dress and an extraordinary black cape with the New York City skyline silhouetted in embroidered sparkling stones. Gorgeous!
Then a newsflash appeared on my phone. The political news website Politico was leaked an initial draft majority opinion from the Supreme Court, written by Justice Samuel Alito, and the site published the draft in full. The Supreme Court has voted to strike down Roe vs Wade.
This 1973 landmark decision protects a pregnant woman's right to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction.
"Roe was egregiously wrong from the start," Alito writes. "It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people's elected representatives."
That was as far as I read before I put my phone back into my purse. My heart started racing, my shoulders tensed, and my pace quickened.
My body understood the threat immediately. It's taking a while for my brain to catch up.
The decision to strike down Roe vs Wade in this draft opinion is a draft subject to change, but the opinion will likely stand and will be officially published in the coming months.
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden called on elected officials around the US to protect women's right to abortion and, in a statement, said: "I believe that a woman's right to choose is fundamental, Roe has been the law of the land for almost 50 years, and basic fairness and the stability of our law demand that it not be overturned."
New York governor Kathy Hochul said on Twitter that the decision is "an absolutely disgraceful attack on our fundamental right to choose, and we will fight it with everything we've got".
"Let me be loud and clear: New York will always guarantee your right to abortion. You have our word," she said.
I am taking the document at face value and thinking through the decision. It is shocking. It is shocking even though conservative-led legislatures introduced a record number of abortion restrictions last year, limiting women's human and civil rights.
It is shocking, although it has been obvious for years now, that some Republicans were working on packing the Supreme Court with Republican judges with this exact goal in mind.
It is shocking because of the scale of the destruction, the speed at which it's coming, and the implications for every person living in this country.
I have two questions: what this decision means for the country, and why it's happening.
Should it become the final ruling by the court, the decision means that individual states could completely ban abortion or limit what few services, including medications, are accessible.
Twenty-six states are certain or likely to ban abortion. Women will face greater travel distances to reach a clinic. Here in New York, reproductive rights are protected by our state laws, but every state will feel the effects of abortion bans.
Women who can afford to will continue to travel to states that still have abortion rights. It's hard to predict what else will happen on a state level because the strange fact is that polling shows that most Americans want to keep abortion legal.
Regular people do not create criminalisation; it is created by laws, of course.
Poor people and people of colour are already over-policed, so these groups will continue to be targeted and likely suffer the consequences of this transformation more than their wealthier or whiter neighbours.
That is just a glimpse of what the future could look like, in a practical sense, when Roe vs Wade is overturned.
The threat I instinctively felt when I heard the news on a spring evening in Brooklyn could not be more real. The fight that never went away is back, more furious than ever. Why this is happening is a bigger and darker question than how it is happening, with a bigger and darker answer.
For some of us, abortions will become dangerous; for others, they will indeed become inaccessible, and that is devastating.
Abortion has been co-opted into the culture wars here in the United States and into a moral grey area by the religious right. This works well for those who seek to control women's bodies, which is ultimately the actual battle.
Abortion is not about babies or mothers; Irish women and children learned that the hard way. In this paper, two American public health experts reminded us of what happened in Ireland when women were forced to carry pregnancies to term:
"Ireland travelled down this road for most of the 20th century, when women and girls, many survivors of rape or incest, were forced to carry pregnancies to term and then relinquish their children in the mother and baby homes."
It's clear that the fight is about subjugation rather than healthcare when we see those anti-abortion activists failing to advocate for subsidised childcare, let alone provide access to contraception and sex education to young people or medical care for mothers in a country with a massively high maternal mortality rate.
On Monday night I was living my life, doing my work, loving my community, enjoying the frivolity of celebrities in fancy gowns. Then the hammer came down.
I understood once more, clearer now, that safe abortion for everybody is slipping further out of reach, and with it, our human and civil rights. Women will continue to live our lives, snatching moments of calm and joy and family where we can.
Meanwhile, in this country, we are in danger.
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