Abortion: is the US on the brink of historic change?
Anyone listening to the arguments in the US supreme court last week on abortion “could not miss that something historic was happening”, said Mary Ziegler in The Atlantic (New York). The hearing involved a Mississippi law that seeks to ban abortions after 15 weeks’ gestation. Such a ban would be flatly at odds with Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 decision that gives every woman the constitutional right to abortion until foetal viability, around 24 weeks. Yet judging by last week’s arguments, the conservative-majority court has no intention of declaring Mississippi’s law unconstitutional. When it rules on the case next year, it looks set to either ditch the viability line, allowing the 15-week limit; or, more likely, to “get rid of Roe altogether”, transferring the right to choose from individuals to state legislators. “That would be one of the most significant reversals of supreme court precedent in American history.”
Contrary to what some are claiming, there is nothing outrageous about either of the options being considered by the supreme court, said Marc A. Thiessen in The Washington Post. Out of the 42 countries in Europe that allow abortions, 39 – including
France and Germany – bar elective abortions from 15 weeks or before. In a 2014 study of 198 countries, the US was just one of seven that allowed elective abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy (two of the others were China and North Korea). Overturning Roe would simply return this question to individual states to decide, and return the supreme court to the position of neutrality that it should never have abandoned, given that the constitution is silent on the issue of abortion.
I don’t think many people will regard it as a neutral position if the court overturns Roe, said David Brooks in The New York Times. Just look at the furious crowds outside the court last week. I used to support overturning Roe on the basis that it would take the politics out of the issue, and most states would adopt the middleground stance of most Americans who favour some restrictions but no bans. But we live in a democracy where, owing to today’s “brutalised political culture”, the views of the majority often don’t prevail, losing out to the louder views of the “polarised minority”. The furore since the hearing suggests “the post-Roe politics would make even our current politics seem tame. I’m not sure our democracy is strong enough for that.”