By Lauren Levey
Here’s where we are:
In a 5-4 ruling Dec. 10, 2021, the Supreme Court left intact a Texas abortion law (S.B. 8) that prohibits abortion before most women even know they are pregnant; and allows it to be enforced through lawsuits by private citizens suing in civil court for money damages. While the ruling provides a path for abortion providers to pursue the case further in the lower courts, that path has been drawn so narrowly (by limiting which officials may be sued) that it may be illusory. Liberal Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that the Texas legislature had “substantially suspended a constitutional guarantee: a pregnant woman’s right to control her own body. . . . The court should have put an end to this madness months ago . . . The Court clears the way for States to reprise and perfect Texas’ scheme in the future to target the exercise of any right recognized by this Court with which they disagree.”
On Dec. 1, 2021, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which involves a Mississippi law that restricts abortion to the first 15 weeks of pregnancy, also in conflict with existing case law. At the hearing Dec.1, Justice Sotomayor urged her fellow Justices to follow established precedents, and not write new law simply because there are three new Justices nominated by Pres. Trump: “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don’t see how this is possible.” She really said “stench” in open court as a sitting Supreme Court Justice.
She went on to accuse the Mississippi Solicitor General, who was defending the restrictive law, of using an argument that is “not one well-founded in science at all.” Later she asked him “How is your interest anything but a religious view?” She noted that the Mississippi law would put poor women at particular risk of medical complications and death. “And now the state is saying to these women, we can choose . . . to physically complicate your existence, put you at medical risk, make you poorer by the choice, because we believe what?”
Article 3, section (a) of the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights states:
“States should ensure that the full reproductive rights of women and girls, and unhindered access to comprehensive reproductive services, are upheld.”
As the Vice President of the U.S. chapter of the Women’s Human Rights Campaign, I can state with confidence that this includes abortion on demand, without apology, for all women and girls.
Most women now living have no memory of what it was like to live in the United States as a woman of childbearing age prior to the ruling in Roe v Wade, the 1973 landmark Supreme Court case that gave women the right to choose to abort an unwanted fetus. But I do; and a few days ago I had the opportunity to talk personally about what it was like, and what it meant, in an interview for Green Flame, conducted by Jennifer Murnan. What follows here includes some of that conversation.
1950s American culture, which began around 1946, right after WWII, and ended fairly dramatically in the early to mid 1960s, coincided with my childhood. For girls and women, 1950s culture presented numerous types of restraints that worked together, producing widespread misery that was apparent whenever you were allowed to see beneath the forced smiles and pastel colors:
1. Abortion was illegal.
2. Virginity ideology (for girls) was the norm.
3. Birth control devices were generally not available to single young women.
4. Marriage laws were draconian for women; but you only found out when you divorced.
5. Discrimination against women in employment was generally considered reasonable.
6. Lesbians were criminals, but also invisible.
7. If you were a little girl, pretty much everything you were taught about how the culture worked was a lie.
Virginity ideology meant that substantial social stigma and financial hardship resulted from giving birth to a child while unmarried. There were girls in high school with me who were expelled from school simply for becoming pregnant. Something about avoiding corrupting other girls, I was told. I was horrified. For me, education and career constituted the only path I could see to achieving control over my life; but pregnancy could disrupt a girl’s education even before high school graduation.
Under those cultural circumstances, employers would reasonably hesitate to hire or promote any woman, if they had an alternative. After all, women could without warning have their lives and careers disrupted by unplanned pregnancy, rendering them inherently unreliable employees.
Even though I had a strong suspicion from an early age that I was a lesbian, and therefore unlikely to experience a badly timed pregnancy, I was as affected by the cultural presumptions as heterosexual women. This is because lesbianism was paradoxically stigmatized, criminalized, and also made invisible. The message seemed to be that lesbians didn’t exist any more than Tinkerbell did; but just in case they did, they could be shunned and jailed. There was an overwhelming presumption of heterosexuality. So explaining to an employer that he didn’t need to worry about my having a career-disrupting pregnancy because I was a lesbian would not have enhanced my employment prospects.
Eventually it became clear to me that having free access to both birth control and abortion would be in the interest of every woman who wants even moderate control over the trajectory of her own life.
I entered Bennington College, a tiny, very liberal women’s college, in 1965. To my delight, the 1950s were suddenly over, as though a switch had flipped. My contemporaries were enraged, as I was, by the culture of lies and corruption and war and injustice, and determined to address all of it without delay. We were so done with the 1950s, and suddenly we were old enough to organize in opposition to it.
When a fellow student became pregnant, we passed the hat. There was a nearby OB-GYN, a woman, who would perform an illegal but medically safe abortion for $1200. That’s $1200 in 1965 currency. It seemed fair because the young doctor, if discovered, stood to lose her livelihood or even her liberty. We would pass the hat again and again until we had enough. I’m not aware of any student who needed an abortion who didn’t get one while I was at Bennington.
Roe v Wade was decided in 1973. It ruled that a woman’s right to abort existed, and that it diminished over the course of her pregnancy. My thoughts about the ruling were complicated. On one hand, it was a great relief. Abortion would be legal and accessible everywhere in the United States. On the other hand, some of us also felt angry and disappointed that the all-male Supreme Court had denied a woman’s right to absolute sovereignty over the interior of her own body; and that birth — that is, emerging from the mother’s body — is the natural and obvious time to give a person human rights — and not one moment before. How does it make sense that a stranger wearing a judicial robe or a pastor’s robe has more interest in a fetus than the woman whose body protects it, the woman whose DNA it shares? It seemed a bad compromise, but a great relief nevertheless.
Immediately after Roe, abortion-related deaths dramatically plummeted. Not surprisingly, most of the prior preventable deaths were deaths of poor women and women of color. Even in the 1950s and 60s, women needed agency and control over their lives as they needed air and water. If safe abortion once again becomes unavailable, unsafe abortions will occur; it is inevitable because women will risk their lives for liberty and agency. And once again, the women who die will disproportionately be poor and women of color. This is not debatable, and also not a secret.
It is not hard to see that there is currently a global trend toward once again forcing women out of public life and back into the home. It can be seen in the move to remove all public opportunities for women to be only in the company of other women through the lie of “gender identity”; the attempts to re-stigmatize lesbians; the increased violence and subjugation of women by men in ordinary movies as well as in porn; the increased pornification of women’s fashion; and the erosion of women’s right to abortion.
The Women’s Liberation Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s was advanced by two crucial tools: women meeting in women-only spaces and talking together about the political class called “women”; and greatly increased options for controlling our reproduction. It is no accident that both of these rights are now being taken away, one by the Left, the other by the Right. Once again, women are going to die as a result, because women, like all people, will risk our lives for bodily autonomy; and once again, the burden will fall disproportionately on poor women and women of color. The 1950s have been summoned back, and the new version will be smarter. Women will need to respond accordingly.
