Women’s rights in peril

Never in American history has the U.S. Supreme Court, on its own initiative, simply swept away a right as broadly held by so many people as a woman’s right to choose whether to have an abortion. Yet according to a leaked draft decision, the high court’s conservative majority appears poised to do just that this summer.

“Legislating from the bench” is too gentle a euphemism for this abrogation of a woman’s right to make her own reproductive choices. Call it “tyranny from the bench.”

And if Democrats who now control Congress do nothing to stop this, they will be as good as complicit in this looming travesty — which all Americans should fear for the infringement it represents on individual liberty and personal privacy.

To suggest that the right is not being taken away, since it would be left to states to decide whether to permit, limit, or ban abortion entirely — is utterly disingenuous. What is a nationwide right today would suddenly no longer be a nationwide right in a not-too-distant tomorrow, if the court follows through on the draft decision penned by Justice Samuel Alito.

The decision, first published by Politico, declares that the right to an abortion is neither guaranteed explicitly by the Constitution nor implied; unenumerated rights, it argues, must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and traditions” in order to be assumed. Yet the hard-fought right to an abortion — a procedure practiced in North America long before the Constitution was written — has been part of U.S. history and tradition for nearly half a century, well over onefifth of our time as a nation.

Abortion would be banned or severely restricted in at least 23 states if the court strikes down Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which together affirmed the right to an abortion and created an “undue burden” standard for restrictions. For women in nearly half the country, that right would be gone unless they had the means to travel to a state where abortion was still legal — a burden that exists for no other form of health care — or were willing to take the deadly risks that history has shown come with an illegal one.

And it would be gravely wrong to assume this is not the foundation of a new effort to ban abortion nationally. Americans — a majority of whom support abortion rights — have been deceived long enough by anti-abortion rights politicians who hid behind fuzzy statements like “Roe v. Wade is the law of the land”; the three newest conservatives on the Supreme Court, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, similarly prevaricated in confirmation hearings, hiding their willingness to let personal views supersede court precedent and an established right.

With their control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House, Democrats must at least try to do what New York and some other states have done: Enshrine the right to an abortion in the law of the land. Control of the legislative and executive branches may be fleeting, but it is also hard to achieve, making laws hard to undo.

But they must act quickly. With midterm elections approaching, the need to not let five or six reactionary justices set back the cause of women’s rights could not be more urgent.