When the news dropped around 9 p.m. on Monday, one woman said she’d stomped around her house, cussing. Another said she cried. Only 20 hours after the unprecedented leak of a looming Supreme Court decision to undo nearly a half-century of abortion rights, they and more than 100 other people, mostly women, showed up at the Delaware County, Pennsylvania, courthouse in Media to raise their voices in protest.
The protesters were loud. They were definitely mad and frustrated, but the one thing you didn’t hear was surprise. The method of delivery — a news leak of an unpublished majority opinion — may have been a shock, but these women protesting for their reproductive rights said they’d been anxiously expecting this moment for a long time.
“I got my tubes tied, because I saw this coming,” Elisabeth McColm, a 36-year-old teacher who lives near Media, told me. She was watching the speakers from the courthouse steps and clutching the sign she’d quickly drawn up before racing over after work: “Banning Abortion Doesn’t Save Babies, It KILLS Women.” McColm, who has an 8-year-old daughter, said she was determined to make her own reproductive choices before an increasingly conservative Supreme Court made them for her.
