Where Was Everyone? The Fatal Siloing of Abortion Advocacy

Abstract

Where Was Everyone? The Fatal Siloing of Abortion Advocacy Meaghan Winter (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution On December 13, 2021, activists with ShutDownDC held a candlelight vigil to draw attention to the Supreme Court's attack on abortion rights and mark the fiftieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade. (Alex Wong/Getty Images) [End Page 100] I briefly dated a man who told me that he thought abortion should be legal but “didn’t think it should be used as birth control” and later, with no sense of irony, argued with me and then became so angry that I was frightened when I insisted that we use a condom. I bring this up for a couple of reasons. First, public writing about abortion is usually either personal and confessional or, more often, legalistic, political, and abstracted from what abortion is really about—people’s bodies, the most private aspects of their lives, and the bargains, dilemmas, and battles, small and large, that cisgender women face as a matter of course. Second, abortion is usually framed as a women’s issue, and it does, of course, foremost affect women. But straight men of my generation have also built their lives—lives often defined by enormous freedoms—on access to contraception and abortion. Those of us who came of age after Roe v. Wade have rarely had to reflect on how legal abortion has shaped our most basic assumptions about our lives. If you’ve grown up in a country with legal abortion, and particularly if you’re a straight man, I ask that you pause and imagine what your private life would have been like if had you faced the real possibility of creating a pregnancy that couldn’t be terminated every time you had sex. Consider everything that makes up your life—degrees or jobs, yes, but also your friendships, marriages, turns in the road, children born because they were wanted, whatever you value—and appreciate how much of it was made possible by living in a society where abortion was legal and often presumed accessible. The right to have an abortion is in peril. This spring, the Supreme Court will hand down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, the most pivotal abortion case in fifty years. Under consideration is Mississippi’s ban on abortions after fifteen weeks, which the state legislature passed in 2018. According to the central holding of Roe, all pre-viability bans are unconstitutional, which includes a fifteen-week ban. The only remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi, Jackson Women’s Health, sued the state, asking courts to block the law. A district court and then the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit [End Page 101] (which is infamously conservative) sided with the clinic. The state appealed, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments. Dobbs should be an open-and-shut case, and before 2020 it would have been. The only way for the Court to allow Mississippi its fifteen-week ban is to defy decades of precedent and gut the core of Roe. The mere fact that the Supreme Court decided to hear Dobbs is an ominous sign. Usually, the Court will take up a case when the lower federal courts disagree over whether a law is constitutional. In this case, the federal courts agree; they have consistently squashed total pre-viability bans because fifty years of precedent clearly prohibits them. For decades, the Court hasn’t bothered to take up abortion cases that obviously defy Roe. What has changed is the political makeup of the Court, particularly following Trump’s appointment of Amy Coney Barrett. Her nomination, like those of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh before her, was not an accident of history. The Trump administration was able to remake the judiciary for at least a generation, installing an unprecedented number of federal judges and three Supreme Court justices, because leaders of the conservative movement have spent forty years and millions of dollars to incubate a legal establishment that would shrink the power of the federal government, give more leeway to states and corporations, and prioritize conservative social views and textual interpretations of the Constitution. One powerful group, the...