More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The Supreme Court faces a rule-of-law crisis of its own making.
We residents of the United States who are governed but not protected by its laws must now wonder: Which right will be next? And for whom? And if the Court does not exist to respect rights, why does it exist and why should it be respected?
When rights, especially those that sustain our equal citizenship, are stripped away, it is inevitably deeply upsetting to all those who believe in and rely on those rights. But it is a unique and profound loss for law students, who are also experiencing an attack on their nascent professional identities. They are relying on those rights to fulfill their dreams.
Abortion is not (just) a health issue. Whether we are willing to let women and people capable of becoming pregnant control their own bodies, for health or any other reason, is an equity issue—a question of who deserves bodily autonomy and freedom to reach their full potential.
Ultimately, abortion bans and restrictions are part of broader legal and societal structures that were unambiguously designed to not recognize women’s inherent equality.
When Gov. Greg Abbott signed Texas law S.B.8, he provided an oft-heard reason for why the Lone Star state is effectively banning nearly all abortions: “Our creator endowed us with the right to life.”
Abbott’s religious invocation to justify Texas’s law, of course, begs the question: Whose vision of a creator, exactly?
Expanded investment in abortion funds is urgently needed to keep up with current demand for direct aid, as well as to prepare for an uncertain and surely more challenging future.
Central to the defense of reproductive rights for all must be the provision of and commitment to direct aid to the communities facing those attacks head-on.
Texas’s S.B. 8, the state’s near-total abortion ban, went into effect on the same day that S.B. 1, an omnibus voter suppression package, was passed by both chambers of the state legislature. The parallels between these laws extend well beyond their synchronized timelines.
Conservatives have relentlessly focused on reshaping the Supreme Court for decades. And now, they’ve allowed Texas’s six-week abortion ban to stand for months because a handful of oil and gas tycoons exerted massive influence over Texas politics by funneling millions into statehouse races.
To a large extent, this stunning outcome is a story of democratic failures and the power of big money in American politics.
Progressives are giving new attention to reforming the Supreme Court—but it would be a mistake to stop there. We also need to pay greater attention to state courts and state constitutions as a promising, underappreciated and frequently threatened venue for protecting rights.
Of course, courts can’t be the only path to achieving reproductive justice—but we won’t have reproductive justice without them.
Reproductive rights are under attack, and that means our rights to participate fully and freely in civic life are too. The criminalization of abortion forces a dual deprivation upon people who can become pregnant: Not only do we lose bodily autonomy, we lose our place in the body politic.
Throughout history, appeals to pseudoscience have undermined true reproductive autonomy. And now, the Supreme Court and state courts have become increasingly willing to defer to or even adopt pseudoscience, undermining science-based policies—from abortion bans to COVID mitigation strategies.
