By: Ernest Gurulé
For nearly fifty years hard core Republicans and religious conservatives have seen abortion as a wrong and not a right, certainly not a right women should have. Last Friday, these two groups and a right-leaning Supreme Court hit a decades-long target effectively killing abortion in states spread across the country. Just as the 1973 ruling that guaranteed the right to abortion has been known as Roe v Wade, Friday’s vote will forever be known as Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, after the Mississippi case that brought the issue to the high court.
With the dust still settling on this momentous decision, laws against abortion are now affirmed where they may have once been thought vulnerable while “trigger bans,” laws designed to take hold if and when Roe was killed, will soon take effect.
Friday’s high court vote was 5-4. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s liberal bloc in advocating for a less restrictive ruling. Diluting the tension of Friday’s decision was a draft opinion leaked weeks earlier and written by Justice Samuel Alito that foretold the fate of Roe. Still, despite the foregone conclusion, the decision landed not so much like a pebble in a pond but with the full force of a giant meteor strike.
In his opinion, Alito found no grey area that would allow even a hint of abortion rights. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start…the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion,” he wrote punctuating a long held position. Nor did he find the argument of stare decisis or settled law a valid claim for the compromise ruling that Roberts favored. As a result, it’s estimated that about half of the states will either ban or severely restrict abortion within a matter of days. (Colorado’s legislature passed the Reproductive Health Equity Act during the recent session reaffirming the right to either carry a pregnancy to term or allow for an abortion.)
The ruling, said Jack Teter, Regional Government Affairs Director of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, will place an extraordinary burden on low income patients needing abortion services, a number already spiking. “We are seeing patients who are driving a thousand miles from Texas with kids in the car,” he said. The trip is often unaffordable and at certain times of the year, also dangerous.
The historic vote by the high court inspired almost immediate emotional reaction. Demonstrations—for and against the vote—sprang up across the country almost immediately after it was announced, including in Denver, and continued through the weekend. Anger directed at the court and especially its three newest members, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett, was especially focused. In confirmation hearings each seemed to suggest they viewed Roe as settled law.
“They lied,” said Aurea Bolaῆos-Perea, Communications Director for COLOR, a Denver-based organization dedicated to assisting “Latinx individuals and their families” with health and reproductive rights. “They are going to set our country back by putting us into a future that’s more dangerous for millions of Americans.” The California native said disgust with the ruling will be felt in November. “I definitely believe it will galvanize first time voters, women, people of color…the court is not going to stop here.”
In fact, with the addition of three new right wing justices, the high court has recently taken a frenzied tack not only on women’s health while also voting to allow for a greater role for religion in public life and more liberal concealed carry gun rights. More ominously, in his vote, Justice Clarence Thomas hinted that the court’s rightward tilt may become even more unabashedly extreme.
“In future cases,” he said, “we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” three cases involving contraception, same-sex relationships and marriage equality. Thomas referred to the three landmark cases as “demonstrably erroneous decisions,” and questioning their constitutional legitimacy.
Critics of last Friday’s decision warn that this court will not stop with ‘guns and God,’ despite assurances that the rights outlined in previous rulings will not be threatened. “We have stated unequivocally that nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion,” the court wrote. But curiously, in its ruling on abortion, Griswold was mentioned or cited nearly two dozen times.
Polling on abortion or choice has been historically favorable. As many as six in ten Americans favor a woman’s right to choose. Also, following Friday’s vote, while stopping short of endorsing abortion, a number of high profile companies including Disney, Patagonia, Netflix, Starbucks and others, announced policies that cover travel expenses for employees desiring abortions.
Friday’s ruling, while hailed by the religious right who believes that life begins at conception, also divided religious communities. While many religions confirm that position, others, including many in the Jewish faith, believe that life begins at birth and not before.
The sudden erasure of constitutional rights by the high court along with a tsunami of anti-abortion restrictions in other states, said Teter, is already having an effect in Colorado. “There has been a twelve-hundred percent increase in Texas patients,” coming to Colorado for reproductive health issues.” Also, while many coming here are younger, poorer and also include immigrant women, they do not make up the totality of patients.
Planned Parenthood, he said, is also seeing many patients who check none of these boxes. “The majority of people who have abortions are already moms,” he said. Many, he added, also identify as Christian. He does not foresee a significant change is the profile of the patients who visit Planned Parenthood. “One in four women will have an abortion before they’re 45,” adding, “We all know someone who has had an abortion.”
The Supreme Court’s Dobbs opinion may now be settled law, but it will do nothing to lessen the cleavage in a nation as socially divided as it is today and most assuredly on an issue as intimate and personal as this.
“It is a woman’s right to determine the needs of their body,” said Denver resident and mother, Kate Logan at this past weekend’s Highland Street Fair. “I am appalled…I am sad and angry and ready to fight!”.
