San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Ruling stuns because court took away rights
On the evening of June 24, hours after the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, several hundred women, men and children marched in protest through downtown San Antonio. Throughout the march, which began and ended at the federal courthouse, women and girls shouted an affirmation, which has been a rallying cry whenever their reproductive rights were threatened: “My body, my choice!”
Men, who never have to worry about their reproductive rights being compromised or denied by legislatures and courts, responded by shouting, “Your body, your choice!”
Until that morning, it was an affirmation courts had acknowledged and protected, dating back to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that established women have a constitutional right to abortion. That Roe would always stand as the law of the land was never secure, given the divide in the United States about abortion, and the long-stated goal and diligence of anti-abortion rights forces within the Republican Party to shape a Supreme Court majority that someday would overturn Roe.
That day came with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned Roe and now leaves it to individual states to legislate abortion.
For millions of Americans genuinely moved because they believe abortion is the ending of life, it was a day of celebration. But for millions of American women, that day delivered surreal anger and fears of waking up one morning and having rights taken away. In many states, including Texas, women no longer have the right to make their own health and family decisions. And one of our fears is that Dobbs represents the beginning of an era in which other liberties — contraception, same-sex relationships, marriage equality — will be stripped away.
Last weekend, Sen. John Cornyn got into hot water for a tweet he sent responding to former President Barack Obama, who denounced the Dobbs decision on Twitter for overturning nearly 50 years of precedent. Cornyn tweeted back, “Now do Plessy vs Ferguson/Brown vs Board of Education.”
In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy that separate was equal. That was overturned in Brown in 1954, when the court ruled that separate could never be equal.
Cornyn’s tweet was misrepresented by many as calling for a return to segregation. That wasn’t what he was doing. Cornyn was, albeit clumsily, echoing some of the Supreme Court justices who, in last December’s oral arguments for Dobbs v. Jackson, brought up Brown to make the analogy that overturning Roe would be like Brown overturning Plessy. For the justices and Cornyn, Dobbs v. Jackson is the moral equivalent of Brown v. Board of Education.
We disagree. Here’s why: Plessy restricted American rights by upholding segregation, which relegated African Americans to second-class citizenship. Roe expanded the rights of Americans by recognizing that a woman’s right to have control over her body, including the right to an abortion, is protected by the Constitution. One decision promised the possibility of equality. The other has created immense inequality as some states will ban abortion while others will grant it.
Imagine if 50 years after Brown, it was overturned — or if any Supreme Court decision that expanded the rights of millions of Americans was tossed out decades later. That is what Dobbs has done to women in America, women who will be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies, whose health will be compromised or whose lives will be jeopardized by this decision. A decision, we can’t help but observe, fueled by Republican hypocrisy about Supreme Court nominations.
Republicans refused to move forward with the confirmation of Merrick Garland following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016. They cited the pending presidential election, stalling for nearly a year until President Donald Trump placed Neil Gorsuch on the court. But they rushed Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation following Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in September 2020.
And now we have a decision deeply unpopular with the electorate.
On this Fourth of July weekend, we celebrate the Declaration of Independence which begins, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
How hollow these words sound today, now that a government instituted among men is making decisions about the bodies of women without their consent.
This decision is no Brown v.
Board of Education