Any non-celibate woman in her fertile years knows the anxiety about an unexpected positive pregnancy test — from disquiet to shock and panic if the barriers to having and bringing up a child are forbidding. From the moment of a positive test, a woman’s options are changed.
And that’s before we get to the consequences of rape, abuse or deceit. Altogether, for all the advances of the morning-after pill, the wide number of reasons which lead women to seek an abortion are a reminder of why the freedom to do so matters.
The repeal of Roe v Wade, which in 1973 established the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy, has unleashed outrage far beyond the US because it reminds us of the fragility of reproductive rights. And if you had asked me a decade ago whether, for all the genuine arguments over term limits and interest of the mother and the foetus respectively, the landmark of Roe v Wade would fall, I would have confidently and wrongly said that whatever else was shifting in the balance of US politics, it was too firmly ensconced to be overturned.
The lesson is that there is no “time’s arrow”, flying in one direction when it comes to reproductive rights. They can be taken away if a mixture of legal, religious and culture wars factors blow in the wrong direction.
Researching the Roe case for a podcast, the story itself is contradictory. The Texas claimant Jane Roe (real name Norma McCorby) was prone to changing her story — and ultimately her mind — about the matter. In the event, the case was decided in favour of the right to abortion on grounds of privacy about family life and advocates of more power to individual states have long opposed the ruling on the grounds that it used one narrow legal category to secure a sweeping right to abortion.
Technically, they have a point. The argument for returning power to the state level looks appealing. In practice, however, it will create chaos and more legal feuding over the right to travel to secure terminations out-of-state. In other words, the “anti-abortion” ruling more likely creates dissent than a clean break with a centralised decision, however it came about.
Where does this leave America’s fraught politics? This story is divisive but beyond the simple divide — that Republicans are more likely to back the “pro-life” cause than Democrats — the political terrain is marshy. Nearly 40 per cent of Republicans support abortion in some cases or within certain term limits, which means there is political risk in the November midterms for the ultra-conservative case — and the prospect of the decision causing splits between fundamental “pro-lifers” and those (like Donald Trump) who have promoted the conservative majority on the court, but not committed themselves fully to the anti-abortion crusade and have more nuanced (or simply opportunistically muddled) views.
Meanwhile, Democrats, who want to challenge the ruling, need to take care how they frame the question and the tone of their case. The number of US voters identifying as “pro-choice” has, if anything, fallen since the mid-Nineties, according to a Gallup poll.
So those banking on a midterm revolt might be courting disappointment if the perception spreads that opposition is the preserve only of liberal progressives. As one Congressman in the fray put it to me in Washington this month: “You have to make a case that appeals to your Republican mother-in law, not just your registered Democrat sister.”
This is not a reason to despair over the urgency of challenging a ban on abortion, which will hit the poorest hardest, and result in abortion tourism and more back-street terminations. But it is a recipe for fighting smartly as well as passionately. Pragmatic Democrats will seek to figure out how far they can break the anti-abortion coalition, by highlighting the unworkability of the new arrangements, rather than driving deeper into culture wars which have had not had a habit of ending up to the advantage of liberals in recent years.
The end of the Roe v Wade era is nowhere near the end of an argument that began in a courtroom in Texas 50 years ago. An activist Supreme Court has found the key to a Pandora’s box of disagreements, exceptions and interpretations and the result is a new climate of fear for women. It is a historic victory — and one without winners.
