The final showdown for Roe v. Wade
The war against women’s reproductive rights has been a decades-long crusade by ultraconservatives upset by the modern world, resentful of changing cultural mores and claiming the moral high ground. That war now seems close to ending with a right-wing victory. A U.S. Supreme Court with a conservative supermajority could easily toss out the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade.
The most surprising feature of the world the ultraconservatives seem poised to create for pregnant women is its abject cruelty. Given that right-wingers claim moral superiority, it’s odd that, in at least some states, they are poised to end exemptions for rape and incest. Why would they insist that a woman or girl who has already endured awful trauma be subjected to more by being forced to carry the pregnancy to term?
Most Americans — even those who are uncomfortable with the idea of “abortion on demand” — support exemptions for rape and incest. A 2018 Gallup poll found that 77% of Americans support the availability of abortion in cases of rape and incest; even more, 83%, support abortion when the woman’s health is endangered.
As law professor Michele Goodwin writes in The Atlantic, hard-right anti-abortion activists have never believed in exceptions for rape and incest. “Many anti-abortion activists never believed that a rape or incest exception could be squared with their deeply held belief that a fetus is a person. Today, the anti-abortion movement is ready to ask for what it wants, and the GOP — and its allies on the U.S. Supreme Court — is willing to give it to them.”
Since Roe is still the law of the land, most Americans have not focused on what the landscape will be like once abortion is illegal in many states.
But some states have already foreshadowed what’s to come. Several, including Florida, have passed laws that would ban abortions at 10 or 15 weeks, which is before many women even know they are pregnant. At least 10 states, most in the South, have enacted stringent restrictions on abortion that include no exemptions for rape and incest. While those laws have met with court challenges, the nation’s highest court might give them the go-ahead if it abandons Roe.
A few ultraconservatives have raced to show what the cruelty of the post-Roe world will look like. In Missouri, state Rep. Brian Seitz proposed a bill that would not only ban abortions after 10 weeks but would also prohibit the termination of an ectopic pregnancy. An ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus, a condition that cannot lead to a healthy baby and that endangers the life of the mother.
Texas, notoriously, has passed a law that encourages private citizens to file lawsuits against anyone who “aids and abets” an abortion. Other states are poised to pass similar laws.
It has long been clear that the fiercest opponents of abortion rights (with some exceptions, notably among Catholic groups) have no great love for children. In the states that have long campaigned against Roe, poor babies are abandoned as soon as they leave the womb — left in poor housing, with little medical care, subjected to inadequate child care and education. Many Americans will likely be surprised by the further cruelty ultraconservatives are poised to dish out if Roe is overturned.