On Friday morning, the lopsidedly conservative United States Supreme Court finally achieved what Republicans have been working towards for decades — overturning the precedent established by the 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade case and officially nullifying the half-century precedent of a federal right to reproductive health care.
The court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization should hardly come as a surprise; a draft of the decision was leaked to the public earlier this spring, to say nothing of the fact that this enterprise of conservative theocratic minority rule is what Republicans have been loudly, and unambiguously trumpeting as their tentpole issue for the nearly 50 years since Roe became law. Despite the obvious inevitability of Friday’s decision, however, Democrats in Washington have somehow managed to cede these opening hours of our new abortion-less future to their conservative counterparts, acting as if they had no idea this — this! — is where things were headed. In a flurry of statements and emails and breathless fundraising appeals released in the wake of the ruling, the party currently in charge of both chambers of Congress and the White House seemed wholly unprepared to actually address the fundamental reality of what happened that morning.
