Land of the free shows us never to take our civil liberties for granted

IS IT possible that we are witnessing the demise of the United States, global bastion of freedom and equality, most progressive nation on the planet, best country in the world for its luxuries, liberties and lifestyles? How has the world shifted so profoundly on its axis that the Irish are the ones resisting the slightest suggestion that abortion services might be curtailed in a new maternity hospital, while Americans are moving to ban terminations altogether? And what will emerge from this bonfire of the certainties?

It is almost 50 years since the famous Roe v Wade decision legalised abortion across the United States by holding that it was a constitutional right guaranteed under the 14th Amendment.

This week, a leaked US Supreme Court judgement revealed a proposal that will disunite the States more than any other possible measure: in future, it will be left to individual states to make their own laws on abortion.

The division on the issue could not be sharper or more irreconcilable. The state of California, for example, passed a law in March to cover out-of-pocket expenses for women availing of abortion services under health plans.

Texas, on the other hand, recently banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, and so far the law has stood up to legal challenge. The state, along with up to 23 others, is preparing to ban abortion completely as soon as the final Supreme Court ruling is published. Ever since Roe v Wade in 1973, and the case of Planned Parenthood v Casey in 1992, which also found that states could not restrict abortion access, there have been constant challenges to the law. Time and again the US courts have struck down attempts to ban abortion before 24 weeks, or the viability of the foetus, originally determined as the cut-off point for the procedure.

The case before the court which has prompted this ruling concerned a ban on abortions after 15 weeks in the state of Mississippi. The longheld precedents are about to be detonated, as the leaked draft declares: ‘We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. It is time to heed the constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.’

In other words, adjoining states might have diametrically opposed abortion laws – and, in a chilling echo of times past in this country, pregnant women might be denied the right to travel to another state for the procedure.

What the actual hell? This is America we’re talking about: land of the free, home of the brave, pioneer of every liberty and every innovation that backward little outposts like ourselves had to be dragged, kicking and screaming and protesting, to embrace. Almost two decades after the seismic Summer of Love in the United States, we still needed prescriptions to buy condoms here. Thirty years after Roe v Wade, we were convulsed by the X Case, where a 14-yearold pregnant by rape was denied to right to travel to the UK for an abortion. We voted two-to-one against divorce in 1986,

at which point the

Americans had been divorcing one another for 120 years. It was another decade before we legalised it, and within little more than two decades we had also voted in favour of both same-sex marriage and abortion. As we accelerated through social change, America was heading into reverse.

Trump’s 2016 election was a symptom rather than the cause of the great disunity; Biden’s presidency has done little to heal it. In Russia, Vladimir Putin points to the gender wars, and Biden putting his ‘he/him’ pronouns on his profiles, as proof of the West’s degeneracy – and there’s a huge constituency across the divided States that agrees with him.

In the midst of this chaos, a Supreme Court packed with conservatives has launched a bunker-buster rocket into the creaking edifice that was once the world’s greatest country. Trump is poised for a comeback, and America seems destined for a frightening new Dark Age.

Here, in stark contrast, our government is hastening to reassure us that abortion rights will be safe in a new maternity hospital on a site leased from the Catholic Church. Same-sex marriage is an unremarkable everyday event, and there have been demands to further liberalise our abortion laws in a forthcoming review. Yet history tells us that, where America has led, we have eventually followed on social issues, lifestyle choices and personal liberties. The impending conflagration in the formerly United States should be a warning never to take our freedoms for granted.