Roe v. Wade would have turned 50 today. How should we mark a missed milestone? | Opinion
Today is the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case extending constitutional protection to abortion services. But instead of celebrating the milestone, we’re marking a lost half-century of progress for women’s bodily autonomy.
As a result, many women — myself included — are feeling a mix of heavy emotions. Yes, this moment should energize us to fight harder for abortion rights, especially as the 2024 presidential election looms. But let’s also sit in this moment and simmer in our outrage and misery.
Women so rarely have outlets for our anger. So today, let’s be angry.
Many people deserve to be the targets of our wrath. Chief among them are the conservative Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe last year, guided in their ruling by religion and politics, not the facts and the law. Their decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization amounted to an unprecedented display of judicial activism.
A majority of Americans support abortion access, with about six in 10 saying abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center poll. The dilemma posed by the court’s ruling in Dobbs is known as the counter-majoritarian difficulty, which describes the judicial branch’s ability to invalidate laws that reflect the will of the people. Dobbs was also a rare example of the high court overturning its own precedent to revoke rather than expand a right, a reversal that seemed to spring arbitrarily from a change in the court’s composition.
In overruling Roe, the Supreme Court therefore not only stripped Americans of their bodily autonomy; it also called its own legitimacy into question.
“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked during oral arguments on an abortion rights case in 2021. “I don’t see how it is possible.”
Indeed, in its consciously Christian nationalist approach, the court’s ruling showed no regard for religious freedom or for the rest of the Constitution the justices swore to protect.
The Dobbs decision disproportionately affects marginalized communities, particularly low-income people of color. As UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky wrote in The Bee in May, pregnant women in states that have criminalized abortion will continue to travel to places where abortion remains legal if they have the means.
“But poor women and teenagers will yet again face a cruel choice between an unsafe, back-alley abortion and an unwanted child,” Chemerinsky wrote.
Fortunately, California is one of those places where abortion remains legal. And in November, Californians affirmed their support for abortion access by passing Proposition 1, which enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution. Although Californians still have access to abortion care, the Dobbs decision has and will continue to affect us in other ways, said Jodi Hicks, president of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California.
“Our providers and health centers have been impacted as we prepare to take care of patients (from outside California) that still need care,” Hicks said. She added that California abortion clinics saw an uptick in cases from outside the state even before Roe was overruled.
Today is not the day to suppress our feelings of fury and disgust at this. Gloria Steinem wrote that “Anger is supposed to be ‘unfeminine,’ so we suppress it,” and that “depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed.”
Today is not for celebrating, but it is not for mourning either. This is a day of female rage.