no you can't ban abortion
The Supreme Court is poised to strike down Roe v Wade. We know this, thanks to a leak published by Politico that you can read here, the proof is in the pudding.
According to WHO, a woman dies of an unsafe abortion every 8 minutes and while most industrialized countries are trying to bring that number down, a cruel conservative minority seems desperate to enlarge it.
It matters because the world is watching a country that already has record amounts of maternal and infant mortality choose to make those markers even worse. It’s already abysmal. The maternal mortality rate in Washington, D.C., is worse than in Syria and an abortion ban would lead to a 21% spike in maternal mortality. The increase would be even greater for women of color and for women who are poor. Research shows that being denied an abortion makes you four times more likely to live under the poverty line and that women who are refused abortions are more likely to report struggling to pay for basic expenses even several years later.
While this leaked decision is devastating, it’s also out of touch. This mystical alternate reality where abortion ceases to exist because it becomes illegal is completely naive. Women have always found ways to get abortions and they will continue to do so even if Roe is overturned. Just look at this secret network of women already organizing to outwit these abortion bans. Women figured out how to get abortions in medieval times and they will figure it out in modern times. Besides, more than half of abortions don’t even happen in abortion clinics, they happen at home with abortion pills that while not being cheap, have a very long shelf life. You simply cannot ban abortion— you can only ban safe abortions.
And yet, the response from the Biden administration, putting the burden of electing more pro-choice politicians on Democratic voters (who have already done so!), has been eye-roll worthy to say the least. Since Democrats are in control of The White House and Congress, they could easily pass a law guaranteeing a federal right to abortion. The Democrats could do this by getting rid of the filibuster but Biden explicitly has already said he’s lukewarm about doing so.
Yet, progressives believe this draconian decision will help them in the midterms because overturning Roe doesn’t have popular support in a single state, not even in the red ones. As Aaron Rupar puts it in his newsletter Public Notice, “there isn’t a single state in the union where support for a federal ban on abortion — something anti-abortion activists and Republicans are already talking about — has more than 30 percent support.” Even the majority of Republicans don’t want a total ban. This decision is deeply unpopular and you can tell by the fact that conservatives are talking more about the leak than about the actual decision today.
The pitch Democrats should be making right now is simple: “Are you with us or with the guys forcing incest victims to have their rapist’s baby? Would you like to vote for the party that wants to protect the person who was the victim of a crime, or the one arguing for a bill that gives the criminal’s family members the right to sue a pregnant victim of that crime? Do you like women alive, or dead?”
And given that an oversized part of the Republican agenda seems to be focussed on stopping the extremely vague “grooming” of children, Democrats should be spending their time reminding voters of just how hypocritical it is for them to claim they want to protect children from abuse when explicitly endangering abused kids who become pregnant.
Republicans can’t ban abortion. Rich men will continue to pay for abortions and wealthy women will continue to travel for them. It’s the people who can’t afford to put gas in their car right now who will pay the price for this. Ultimately the war on abortion is really a conservative war on the poor.
So stay angry at the politicians who do nothing. Buy some abortion pills and if you can afford it use them to redistribute them to your community. And keep putting pressure on the precious corporations that proclaim to love women but stay silent when their human rights are violated, because it might just be working. You can choose to fight back.
This latest SCOTUS decision only validates my distrust of an institution of 9 people being the final say on the rights of others. Even more appalling is that Alito's draft opinion implies overturning Roe v. Wade is just an opening salvo. My partner and I are devastated, livid, and anxious. 😕