As expected, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned 50 years of legal precedent eliminating a woman’s right to an abortion once protected by Roe v. Wade.
We really shouldn’t be surprised. This was what the conservatives have worked toward for 50 years. And in the last six years they took even more aggressive action.
We can blame Sen. Mitch McConnell, who refused to give President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, a public hearing. And blame Obama for not fighting back harder.
We can blame Donald Trump, who stacked the court with three conservative justices. We can blame Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, who both lied during their nomination hearings. We can blame Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski who believed them.
We also can blame those who voted for Trump. We can blame those who refused to support Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and those who refused to vote at all in 2016.
We can blame the six justices who are imposing their extreme Christian conservative morals on women across the country. This is not justice. This is religious oppression imposed upon all of us.
“Today, the Republican-controlled Supreme Court has achieved their dark, extreme goal of ripping away women’s right to make their own reproductive health decisions,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday. “Because of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, the Republican Party and their supermajority on the Supreme Court, American women today have less freedom than their mothers.”
This is devastating. This is a violation. I’m angry.
It’s time to channel the anger into action.
It’s time to take to the streets, organize, mobilize, donate, write, speak, protest, do whatever you can to support women who need access to an abortion. We’re going to have to support networks to help women travel to states like California, where the right to abortion is still protected (for now). We’re going to have to help by sending abortion pills to women in the 26 states where abortion is expected to be banned.
We have to make sure that Democrats maintain the House and the Senate in the midterm elections. If they do, we need to push them to pass a federal law to protect abortion rights. And we need them to revisit the idea of expanding the Supreme Court. The Republicans lied, manipulated and maneuvered to get their conservative majority to overturn abortion rights and force their extreme ideology upon us. We need more liberal justices to get back to reason.
The Republicans haven’t played fair at all. It’s time for Democrats, and for all of us, to fight back.
The Supreme Court has invaded our privacy and our bodies. It’s taken away a woman’s right to decide if and when to have a child. This is nobody else’s business.
The Supreme Court ruling did not leave room for exceptions such as rape or incest. We know the Republicans really don’t care about families. They don’t support funding for child care, parental leave and a living wage.
We also know what’s coming next. They are going to try and criminalize women who seek the abortion pill through the mail or even by traveling to other states. They may even go after those of us who step up to help them.
We can’t be complacent in blue states like California.
Former Vice President Mike Pence, who may run for president in 2024, called for a national ban on abortion Friday. He’s working to further unite the right.
“Having been given this second chance for life, we must not rest and must not relent until the sanctity of life is restored to the center of American law in every state in the land,” Pence said Friday.
Also, take heed of Justice Clarence Thomas’ words that we should revisit the right to contraception. He signaled they’re coming for gay marriage too.
This is outrageous. The American public cannot stand for this. This is not the will of the American people.
Across racial and ethnic groups there is support for abortion with whites (57%) and Latino adults (58%) agreeing abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared with larger majorities of Black (67%) and Asian (68%) adults, according to Pew Research.
Nearly one in four women in the United States (23.7%) will have an abortion by age 45, according to a new analysis by Guttmacher Institute.
A majority of women who have abortions in the U.S. are women of color. In 2019, Hispanic women comprised 21% of those who had abortions; Black women 38%; white women 33%; and 7% other races and ethnicities, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
We also know that among the most impacted will be women of color with the least financial resources.
“Let’s be very clear, the health and life of women in this nation are now at risk,” President Biden said Friday in a speech to the nation.
The president added, “This is not over.”
It is not over. We can’t let the Republicans strip away our reproductive rights, our human rights, our right to make decisions over our own bodies. It’s time to stand up to the religious radicals and fight for democracy.