Draft abortion ruling will devastate women, damage court, divide U.S.

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/05/2022 (970 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Forced birth: it’s the drone strike American women were dreading.

A draft of an upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that gave women a federal constitutional right to abortion, has been leaked publicly and it’s overwhelming. It will flip a modern nation 50 years back in time.

Although most Americans generally favour abortion rights, the decision to come in about two months will push women and the men who love them into a past scarcely remembered.

In 1973, there were no abortion pills or legal abortion clinics, personal cellphones, gay rights, Black lives that mattered, no internet. Let the old times roll.

In those days, women got agonizing back street abortions, attempted self-abortion, died horribly of infections, gave birth to their father’s and their rapist’s infants, killed themselves, were scorned by family and society, and suffered in ways that are difficult for adult Americans to imagine now.

“Every child a wanted child” was once Planned Parenthood’s slogan. It sounds like mockery now.

Since this horror won’t materialize in more progressive coastal states, the U.S. will hyperpolarize even more, not over masks, money or the fight against racism, but as the climax of a decades-long backlash against feminism. Is contraception next? (Yes.)

Written in dread, uncompromising terms by Justice Samuel Alito, 72, the 98-page draft ruling would allow each state its own abortion rules.

Journalist Edward Luce calls it “a Christian fundamentalist opinion [citing] medieval law branding abortion as homicide.” Apparently Alito, like me, keeps a copy of Henry de Bracton’s 13th century treatise on the poisoning of the pregnant for bedside reading.

If the Alito court has its way, about half of American states will immediately or soon end abortion rights, some without consideration for rape, incest, women’s physical or mental health or life situation. Abortion will be criminalized. Just as Ukrainian women raped by Russian soldiers cannot now get abortions in Catholic-ruled Poland, much of the U.S. will become equally merciless.

For the ruling, the court chose a Mississippi case banning abortion after 15 weeks with no rape or incest exemption. Four male justices plus evangelical Amy Coney Barrett — recall their disapproval of overturning “settled law”? — have signed on, leaving three liberal justices helpless.

Chief Justice Roberts’s vote is irrelevant. By inviting a massively unpopular ruling, he will have devastated public regard for the court, even as the Senate and the House have degraded themselves.

Roe was decided 7-2 in 1973, with five Republican appointees joining two justices nominated by Democrats. Republicans weren’t much bothered by abortion, with evangelicals regarding it as a Catholic issue. This changed.

The journalist Jon Ronson has studied this in a new podcast, “Things Fell Apart,” about the small, weird origin stories of American culture wars like abortion, book-banning, QAnon, and online shaming.

In other countries, pebbles in the cultural pond create ripples. In the U.S., he says, “pebbles thrown in the pond create ripples of hatred.”

In the early 1970s, a young evangelical made a strange Fellini-like anti-abortion film episode, “1,000 Dolls,” showing “ghostly children with their faces painted white, wandering the earth like melancholy French mimes” as Ronson describes it, and nude baby dolls in the Dead Sea. “Sodom comes readily to mind when one contemplates the evils of abortion,” a narrator intones. It sparked interest and rumours.

In 1986, “The Silent Scream,” a ludicrous anti-abortion horror-documentary — it showed the procedure as extracting and eviscerating something that looked like a live dolphin — also caused panic. Feminists protested, mainstream media took note, evangelicals and Republicans noticed, and the anti-abortion wars exploded.

I note that current news stories mapping states where U.S. abortion will end often don’t refer to women at all, only the “person,” “adult,” or “womb.”

Current culture wars erasing the word “women” have helped kill the rights of women. Cruelty offers rich rewards.

Heather Mallick is a Toronto-based columnist covering current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @HeatherMallick