Mississippi abortion activists protest as justices weigh ban
JACKSON, MISS. » Supporters and opponents of abortion rights rallied, blared music and shouted taunts Wednesday during protests in Mississippi’s capital as the state took center stage in a pivotal U.S. Supreme Court case that could end a nationwide right to abortion.
Outside Mississippi’s only abortion clinic, men took turns on a loudspeaker urging women to repent of their sins and keep their pregnancies. Some protesters carried graphic posters depicting aborted fetuses.
“What crime has your child committed to deserve to have its arms and its legs pulled off of its body and its head crushed in the womb?” Gabriel Olivier said over a microphone as he paced outside the fence of the clinic in Jackson.
Hours later, more than a 100 people attended an abortion rights rally at a Jackson park near the Governor’s Mansion, some holding signs reading “Abortion Heals” and “SCOTUS Can’t Control Our Destiny — We Do.”
A group of preachers walked into the crowd waving red Bibles and shouting scripture as they tried to drown out speakers. Abortion-rights supporters surrounded the preachers and held signs above their heads.
During the rally, Mississippi resident Patricia Ice spoke about receiving an illegal abortion in Michigan when she was a teenager in the late 1960s.
“The boyfriend wasn’t so committed to me or the relationship,” Ice said. “I was too young to get married.”
Ice said her boyfriend found a woman in Detroit who claimed to be a nurse and said she would do the procedure for $350. Ice said she went home after the abortion terrified she would have complications. She said she couldn’t tell friends or family because they would have been upset.
“I don’t want us to have to go back to those days,” Ice said. “I don’t want to go back 50 years to those days — thinking about it makes me shudder.”
Hundreds of demonstrators also gathered outside the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday as the justices heard nearly two hours of arguments about a 2018 Mississippi law that would ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
The Supreme Court has never allowed states to ban abortion before viability, the point at roughly 24 weeks when a fetus can survive outside the womb. But the court’s conservative majority signaled it would uphold the Mississippi law and may overturn a nationwide right to abortion that has existed for nearly 50 years under the court’s Roe v. Wade decision.