More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Disregarded precedent. A lack of legal restraint. A runaway right-wing majority.
As the U.S. Supreme Court begins its new term, we look back at last one—where, for the first time, the 6–3 conservative supermajority was truly able to wield power. It frequently did so in radical ways.
Right-wing dark money groups are peddling the notion that abortion access “harms” women and, even more outlandish, that the Dobbs decision overturning Roe “empowers” them. This position essentializes women by suggesting their value is centered around motherhood. It also uses pseudo-feminist claims to detract from the very real dangers a post-Roe landscape presents for people and the myriad ways abortion access has helped advance gender equality in the U.S. in the last five decades.
The case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has thrust safe haven laws back into the public spotlight. Safe haven laws ignore the very real risks and burdens associated with pregnancy and childbirth, particularly for vulnerable communities, and were never intended to be a literal alternative to abortion.
These laws ignore the very real risks and burdens associated with pregnancy and childbirth, particularly for vulnerable communities. They also represent an abandonment of “troubled young women” by “deciding that their deep-rooted problems can be saved by an after-the-fact, quick-fix solution.”
In the time following the Supreme Court’s official overturn of Roe v. Wade, I have reflected on what it means to be a teenage girl in a nation that fails to respect women’s rights.
Perhaps I am naive to think that my voice might inspire progress—that, at some point in the future, our nation will respect my right to choose. For now, I only hope that everyone privileged to vote will consider my perspective. I do not want empty words of comfort. I want choice.
Before Roe v. Wade, one of the ways women bypassed the medical system to get necessary abortions was a technique feminists called “menstrual extraction,” using a syringe, flexible plastic tubing and a mason jar to extract the contents of the uterus.
Ms. spoke with activist Carol Downer about her experiences teaching people to perform menstrual extractions and how the procedure could help post-Roe.
“How in the world can that Supreme Court sit up there and deny this thing to us? How can they get away with that? You can guarantee that Amy Coney Barrett has not seen her own cervix.”
Almost 2 percent of babies born in the United States are the result of fertility treatments, together referred to as assisted reproductive technologies (ART). The recent overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court threatens the ability to access the treatments people need to build their families, such as ART.
In a post-Roe world, legislators—most of whom have no medical expertise and cannot get pregnant themselves—in one state could assert that life begins at fertilization, while a neighboring state could say life begins at birth.
Next, all hormonal contraception and IUDs might be outlawed just because some people believe they interfere with implantation and therefore “endanger” the new “life.” Defining personhood as starting at fertilization also has significant implications for in vitro fertilization, a process that creates fertilized eggs.
Over the years friends have asked my advice about their unplanned pregnancies or their daughters’. I don’t give advice. What I say is that I’m thrilled that my son walks the earth, but that the emotional cost was so much higher than I’d imagined. That there was no ‘clean slate’ afterward, only loss. That if I were faced with the same circumstances a second time, I would probably choose an early abortion. That what saved me in the end was the ability to make the choice myself.
The Catholic Church has been the principal religious opponent to advances in birth control and abortion rights and access. But to achieve its goals, it needed allies in its long-term campaign of resistance. It took some time, but they found them.
How conservative Christianity has been systematically waging a half-century war on Roe v. Wade will be the stuff of books and graduate theses. Here are some of the major themes that that they will contain.
Late Monday night, shock waves could be felt across the U.S. after a leaked draft opinion signaled the Supreme Court’s majority decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case concerning a 15-week abortion ban out of Mississippi. The leaked opinion, if and when it takes effect at the end of the Supreme Court’s term (likely in June), represents the biggest blow to women’s constitutional rights in the last 50 years.
Reactions from feminists, lawmakers, reproductive rights advocates and legal scholars have been pouring in as America begins to grapple with the gravity of what abortion access will look like in a post-Roe world.
