Roe Overturned: Where To Go From Here?
Like everyone else, I woke up to the news that Roe has been overturned. Although I know I shouldn’t be as surprised, shocked, and paralyzed as I am, I keep cycling through the first 4 stages of grief every five minutes. It took me a few hours before I could form a coherent sentence through my anger, sadness, and shock. This writing is my way of working through my stream of consciousness and concludes with where I think we should go from here.
My surprise is surprising. I kept thinking that no sane people would overturn a half-century of precedent, a law that has so clearly allowed people who give birth to fully participate in society, that has so clearly saved so many people’s lives. But then I remembered that these people are not sane or rational. This Supreme Court is the most extreme, partisan, and backward in modern history. The worst part is that their decisions will negatively impact this country for at least a generation. My daughter, your daughters, all of our children have been made exponentially less safe in just the course of the last week.
They’ve been trying for so long to get women back into the kitchen while barefoot. Removing the right to comprehensive reproductive healthcare — the right to determine whether, when, and how to have a baby — is the fastest and easiest way to do that. I can’t even imagine the increase in poverty, the decrease in women in higher education, the increase in family violence, the decrease in women in the workforce that we’re going to see in the next decade. After all, abortion is and always has been an economic issue first and foremost. And economics impact everything. (I’m referring to women here, but we know that trans people are also impacted and at risk in just one more way now.)
And to be sure, this is only the beginning. Anything that is not explicitly stated in the Constitution, anything decided based on things like privacy, are on the table. Contraception. Gay marriage. (I won’t digress to talk about how the Texas GOP just explicitly stated in their party platform their desire to remove LGBT rights en masse.) Interracial marriage. Even the right to leave the state for these things. If you think for a second that anything is sacred or off the table, you haven’t been paying attention.
In fact, Clarence Thomas wrote in the decision that “in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous’ [and] we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents. . . . the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated.”
The GOP also has already made it clear that when they control Congress and the White House again, they’ll ban reproductive rights across the country. No abortion allowed in California or New York. No where for people to go. Of course, those with resources have always been able to access abortions by flying to wherever they could safely and legally get them. With the economic divide and income inequality growing by the minute, the vast majority of people in the country will be unable to access this health care. And it IS health care. Health care that people in half of the country are now unable to access while they struggle to feed and house their families.
Of course, trying to reason with and discuss facts with anti-abortion rights people is futile. They don’t care about facts. They don’t care about the actual ramifications on women and families and the country. So I won’t even bother describing the million ways this is such a horrifying, disgusting, and damaging decision. At this point, anyone capable of critical thought knows this, and everyone else is too engrained in dogma to care about understanding.
However, I don’t blame those anti-abortion zealots, as dangerous as they are. Every society has its share of crazy. But most societies wouldn’t allow that level of crazy to come into so much power and control over that society. In our republic, we use democracy to elect our representatives. But half of our society doesn’t bother to participate, which gives us representatives who make participating even harder for those who do want to. So we end up with a lot of crazy in charge of our laws and policies. To be clear, I place a lot of blame on anyone who chose to not vote in 2016 or who voted for Trump to “stick it to the party” because their candidate didn’t win the primary or because they thought that Clinton and Trump were “exactly the same” or because they thought that the rest of the country would turn out and vote for the best person so they weren’t needed. If you are one of those people, this is on you. Make no mistake. Elections matter. Voting matters. Half of the population has now had their rights and freedoms removed as a result of so few people voting.
I feel like this latest Supreme Court session has been my breaking point and I just want to do whatever I can to get to a country where I can raise my kids in a decent, safe society with opportunities. Many know how heartbreaking it was to recently have to turn down a job in the EU, and I’m feeling that heartbreak especially profoundly today.
Wherever I am, though, I still want to be part of the solution for the millions of people in this country who don’t have options. Here are some of the things that I would like to help work on:
1. Passing the ERA (finally);
2. Creating a national hotline similar to the National Domestic Violence Hotline wherein people could call to get practical advice and support on where and how to get reproductive healthcare, and connecting the vast national network of reproductive health advocates, services, and providers with that hotline;
3. Ensuring there is massive amounts of funding available for reproductive health services anywhere and everywhere it’s legal, as well as massive amounts of funding available for organizations that help women travel and pay for those services, financially and otherwise;
4. Having a well-funded and enormous national public service campaign about this hotline and services that reaches every crevice between every amber wave of grain, so that everyone knows there ARE resources available to them and are able to distinguish between these resources and harmful crisis pregnancy centers; and
5. Working to get Native American tribes to open abortion clinics on their land.
In the meantime, I am trying to heed Michelle Obama’s always brilliant words: “Our hearts may be broken today, but tomorrow, we’ve got to get up and find the courage to keep working towards creating the more just America we all deserve. We have to much left to push for, to rally for, to speak for. . . .”
The only thing I can do with my rage is what I know best: Bake. So one of the things getting me through this day is planning a huge bake sale and cake auction to fund abortion rights organizations. It may not be much — after all it’s a “bake sale” of fundraisers — but it’s something and it’s a start. Stay tuned about that.
