Losing Roe means end to critical rights for US women
The Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade as soon as its “leaked” decision becomes final, probably in a few weeks. The ruling will take away fundamental constitutional rights for women that have been in place for 49 years. It’s the equivalent of ruling that Black children no longer have a right to go to school with white children.
The Court is setting an extremely dangerous antiAmerican precedent because it has never before taken away constitutional rights. It has given people rights, and on occasion weakened them, but never have they taken them away completely.
The decision was probably leaked by Justice Alito, who wrote it, as a trial balloon to gauge public reaction. Thus far, Rome is not burning because unlike the people behind Black Lives Matter, women have no clue how to use their political power. They have been splintered and ineffective since the mid-1960s when the National Organization for Women was founded to fight against the Equal Rights Amendment.
That’s right, NOW fought against a constitutional amendment to establish women’s legal equality in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and only started supporting the ERA after it became clear in 1973 the ERA would not be ratified by the requisite number of states before a purported deadline expired.
Women have been politically useless ever since. In fact, when the National Woman’s Party was unceremoniously dissolved in January 2021, nobody noticed. So it’s no surprise the Supreme Court thinks it can politically get away with decimating women’s basic human right to personal autonomy and bodily integrity.
Alito said Roe must be overturned because the right to abortion does not exist in the text of the Constitution. But neither do countless other rights, including the right to a fair trial, gay marriage and the so-called “right” of corporations under the Fourteenth Amendment to Equal Protection of the laws.
The Supreme Court declared corporations to be persons in the late 1800s even though the Constitution says nothing about this. Around the same time, the Supreme Court also ruled that women were not persons. The idea that a right has to be in the text of the Constitution for it to be valid is nonsense.
Nonetheless, if the ERA were added to the Constitution, the Supreme Court would have no choice but to uphold Roe v. Wade, but the Biden administration is blocking it. Women are trapped in second class citizenship in a country that prides itself as a democracy while it hypocritically runs around the world injecting itself into other people’s wars in purported defense of democratic values.
The ERA should already be in the Constitution because despite the deadline it was ratified by the last necessary state in 2020, but the Trump administration blocked it by directing the U.S. Archivist not to publish it in our Constitution as the 28th Amendment.
Women were urged to vote for Biden because he said he supports the ERA, but when he took office he fought against the ERA the same way Trump did, and he is still blocking the ERA.
Instead of criticizing Biden, the Democrats’ battle-cry today is that the only way to save Roe is to eliminate the filibuster so Congress can codify Roe as a federal statute. Nice try. Democrats had ample opportunity in the past to codify Roe, but they didn’t.
They are using this disastrous Supreme Court decision to rally votes for November; votes they do not deserve. If Democrats actually cared about women, they would be clamoring for Biden to pick up the phone and tell the U.S. Archivist to put the ERA in the Constitution, now.
Women are not stupid.
They know Joe Biden has the power to save abortion rights with a phone call. If he refuses, women will vote with a vengeance against Democrats in November, not because Republicans are any better, but because it’s easier to rally women in a fight against the devil they know, and women have a lot to fight about.
Wendy Murphy is adjunct professor of sexual violence law at New England Law|Boston where she has taught for 15 years. An impact litigator whose work in state and federal courts around the country has changed the law to improve protections for women’s and children’s constitutional rights, she developed and directs many projects in conjunction with the school’s Center for Law and Social Responsibility.