Roe v Wade

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      Ending Roe v Wade could badly backfire on Republicans during elections this year | Lloyd Green

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      Ending Roe v Wade could badly backfire on Republicans during elections this yearLloyd GreenThe Democrats now have a fighting chance to maintain control of the Senate. Their odds of retaining and flipping seats have improved overnight On Monday night, Politico reported that a majority of the US supreme court is poised to overturn Roe v Wade, eviscerate a half-century of precedent, and leave the issue of abortion to the states. Five of the court’s nine justices are prepared to give the Republican base exactly what it demanded. The remaining question for the Republican party is whether answered prayers are the most dangerous.Through the Trumpian looking glass, forcing women to die from illegal abortions is ‘pro-life’ | Marina HydeRead moreIf the leaked draft of the majority opinion in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization is close to the final cut, the court stands to energize otherwise dejected Democrats and put Republican members of Congress in Democratic-leaning states at risk. Expect the anticipated Republican House majority in the midterms to be smaller than currently projected.Indeed, the Democrats also now have a real shot to maintain their control of the Senate. Overnight, their odds of retaining seats in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and New Hampshire, while flipping Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, improved.Beyond federal offices, fights will now be waged this fall over governorships and legislatures in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020, but where the incumbent governor is a Democrat, and the legislature is in the hands of the Republican party. In a post-Dobbs world, look to the states to emerge as roiling battlegrounds.Make no mistake, the draft opinion is sweeping. “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Justice Samuel Alito writes for himself and four of his colleagues. “It is time to heed the constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” Along the way, the ruling also offers implicit criticism of the court’s prior decisions on personal autonomy.Prior precedents on contraception, interracial marriage, consensual sex and gay marriage are now at risk. At a February debate among Michigan’s prospective Republican candidates for attorney general, all three men, including Matthew DePerno, Donald Trump’s choice, criticized Griswold v Connecticut. In that case, the US supreme court struck down a state law that barred the sale of contraceptives to married couples.DePerno, an advocate of election conspiracy theories, framed his understanding of this this way: “The supreme court … has to decide, mark my words, that the privacy issue currently is unworkable. It’s going to be a states’ rights issue on all these things, as it should be.” DePerno is also the state Republican party’s officially preferred candidate.Elissa Slotkin, a moderate Michigan Democrat, tweeted on Monday night: “If tonight’s news is true, Michigan’s 1931 state law banning abortion would snap back into effect, making any abortion illegal in our state – even if the mom will die, or if she was raped by a family member. No exceptions.”A former member of the US intelligence community and the wife of a retired army helicopter pilot, Slotkin added: “My poor mother is turning over in her grave. The House has already voted to codify Roe – let all Senators be on record on this one in an up or down vote.”In the same neo-Confederate spirit as Michigan’s DePerno, the Indiana senator Mike Braun offered up his benighted take on interracial marriage. Braun argued that like abortion, interracial marriage should be left to the states to decide – not the federal judiciary. Said differently, he was arguing that the supreme court got it wrong in Loving v Virginia.“When you want that diversity to shine within our federal system, there are going to be rules and proceedings, they’re going to be out of sync with maybe what other states would do,” Braun announced.“It’s the beauty of the system, and that’s where the differences among points of view in our 50 states ought to express themselves.”After the ensuing uproar, Braun walked his words back. But in light of Politico’s reporting, the Democrats now have names, faces and an issue. Think ready-made campaign ad.To be sure, clearer Republican heads viewed the wholesale gutting of Roe as a threat to the Republican party’s elected officials. In the summer of 2021, they attempted to guide the court’s hand; they failed.Last July, 228 Republican members of Congress, 44 senators and 184 House members, filed an amicus brief in support of the Mississippi abortion law in question. Nowhere did the Republican submission refer to contraception, interracial marriage, or individual autonomy. Likewise, the word “privacy” only appeared as a part of a title of a footnoted law review article. Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert couched their arguments in pastels. Words like “previability” filled the page, as did polling data.Justices Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, however, were having none of that. For them, it is time to return to what they consider the original constitution.More than seven in 10 Americans oppose overturning Roe even as the public is split over where to draw a line. In Texas, 77% support legal abortions in case of rape and incest. Not all restrictions are the same. America’s cold civil war just got really hot.
      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York. He was opposition research counsel to George HW Bush’s 1988 campaign and served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
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      There’s rage at this Roe v Wade mess – and those on the left who didn’t see it coming | Emma Brockes

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      There’s rage at this Roe v Wade mess – and those on the left who didn’t see it comingEmma BrockesFrom anti-Hillary Democrats to Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who clung on at Supreme Court, unlikely targets are being identified for blame After the initial shock, the blame. On Monday, when news broke of the leaked US supreme court draft opinion overturning Roe v Wade, millions of horrified Americans sought emotional release. “I am angry,” said Elizabeth Warren, voice shaking, leading a pack of reporters straight over a flowerbed outside the supreme court. Her face ignited with rage as she reminded them that 69% of Americans are against overturning the abortion legislation. “The Republicans have been working towards this day for decades,” she said. In the background, a man shouted, “You want to dismember children in the womb!”For many of us, that man – the you-want-to-kill-babies guy – and his ilk were not the first target for righteous abuse. It’s hard, in moments of duress, to get much satisfaction from reiterating an existing and long-held revulsion, particularly when its subject is beyond reasonable reach. When considering the rightwing architects of this moment, there was no “what if” in attendance; all the what ifs belonged to the left. Political purists who in 2016 urged Democrats to avoid voting for Hillary Clinton (hi, Susan Sarandon) were the first in line, and social media echoed to the sound of, “We told you this would happen.”Biden condemns efforts of extremist ‘Maga crowd’ to overturn Roe v Wade abortion protections – as it happenedRead moreSacrificing the good in pursuit of the better and winding up with the absolute worst – a dynamic as familiar to British as to American leftwing politics – was, in this moment of horror, a more enraging consideration than flat hatred of the right. From revived outrage at the Bernie bros, it was a quick descent into rage against various champions of the left. “You know who I blame for this?” said a friend. “Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” The late supreme court justice’s vanity in hanging on to her seat, her overconfidence that Clinton would win, her refusal to listen to warnings from the Obama White House that, should the unthinkable happen and the Republicans regain the presidency, the first casualty would be Roe v Wade – her fundamental enjoyment, one assumed, of being RBG when she could have ceded her seat to an Obama appointee – twisted us up into pretzels. I love Ginsburg, so all this had about it the extra and extremely female zing of self-harm.Oh, and Clinton wasn’t off the hook either. “If she’d bothered to campaign in Michigan,” said another friend sourly, “none of this would’ve happened.” All the terrible, bad-tempered fights of that election flew back up into the air, like a water column after a bomb. The only Republican who came in for similar ire was that idiot Susan Collins, senator from Maine, a supporter of abortion rights who had nonetheless voted in line with her party to confirm both Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the supreme court. Both had assured her, she said at the time, that they wouldn’t go after Roe v Wade. Shocked! Shocked, she was, this week to discover these were not men of their word.Of course, all this fury was mere displacement for the fundamental truth that rightwing forces were smarter, more organised, disciplined and talented in prosecuting a digestible narrative – “don’t kill babies” – than the fractured and dissembling left. Progressives tried to rally towards concrete solutions. There were things to be done – in the first instance, register to vote. (After less than a year of citizenship, I hadn’t. This weekend, I will). There was the call for fundraising. Celebrities started throwing around $10,000 matching donations to anyone giving to local abortion funds.And both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, as well as senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, hyped the necessity of codifying Roe v Wade in Congress, a move backed by President Biden that would enshrine the right to abortion in federal law irrespective of actions taken by the supreme court. It sounds good, and has the advantage of generating political action. But it is also a long shot, a case of last-resort measures, and too little too late. Earlier this year, Democrats tried to codify Roe, and while it passed the House it failed in the Senate, overcome by a filibuster. (Then “we must end the filibuster”, tweeted Sanders. None of this can happen quickly, if at all.)The fact is that if, as Warren said, the Republicans had been planning this moment for decades, rigging composition of the supreme court with precisely this endgame in mind, there was, irrespective of the scale of public outrage, no immediate way to turn back. In this first week of shock, before anger might become effectively organised, there was only the tiny compensation of the blame spiral.
      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
      TopicsRoe v WadeOpinionAbortionElizabeth WarrenUS politicsUS supreme courtLaw (US)WomencommentReuse this content More

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      Is Biden willing to go against the supreme court to save Roe v Wade? Politics Weekly America – podcast

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      According to a draft majority opinion published by Politico this week, the US supreme court has voted to overturn Roe v Wade in the clearest sign yet that the constitutional right to abortion will probably be taken away from millions of Americans very soon.
      This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Moira Donegan about what it will take to stop the majority conservative bench, whether Democrats are willing to pull rank, and if they don’t, whether it is even accurate to call the US the land of the free

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      To enter our prize draw, Worthy Winners, nominate someone who you think deserves to win one of 10 pairs of tickets to this year’s Glastonbury festival. Entrants and nominees must be 18 and UK residents. Listen to Thursday’s episode of Today in Focus on abortion rights Sign up to First Edition for free at theguardian.com/firstedition Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      Schumer announces Senate abortion rights vote: ‘America will be watching’ – as it happened

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      US politics liveUS politicsSchumer announces Senate abortion rights vote: ‘America will be watching’ – as it happened
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       Updated 1h agoRichard LuscombeThu 5 May 2022 16.14 EDTFirst published on Thu 5 May 2022 09.26 EDT Show key events onlyLive feedShow key events onlyFrom More

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      After victory in the US, now the far right is coming for abortion laws in Europe | Sian Norris

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      After victory in the US, now the far right is coming for abortion laws in EuropeSian NorrisThe attack on Roe v Wade has roots in well-funded organisations whose tentacles have spread across the Atlantic For those of us who have been watching the assault against abortion in the US for years, this week’s leaked supreme court draft opinion – which could pave the way for an overturning of Roe v Wade – came as no surprise.Roe v Wade protects the right to an abortion in the US up to the point a foetus can survive outside the womb, and the religious and far-right have been gunning for it since it was introduced in 1973. Evangelical ideologues, far-right actors and radical-right billionaires have organised to undermine women’s right to safe, legal abortions through a combination of violence against clinics and doctors, dark money and political influence.‘Unnecessary suffering and death’: doctors fear for patients’ lives in a post-Roe worldRead moreSo, how did the US get here?After years of legal assaults that restricted abortion access and targeted clinics in Republican states; years of disinformation spread by “crisis pregnancy centres”, where women are persuaded to not have abortions; and years of burdensome demands on women to endure ultrasounds, gain parental consent and put up with counselling in order to have a termination, Trump’s election opened the door for abortion rights to end in the US.Ultimately, it required courts, not politicians, to end abortion. That’s where the Federalist Society comes in. Headed by Leonard Leo, the legal organisation supported anti-abortion lawmakers across the US into positions of influence where they could draft laws to ban abortion after 15 weeks … 12 weeks … six weeks … and completely. The end goal was for anti-abortion states to try to implement one of these laws, where it would be challenged again and again until it reached the supreme court.To do that, the anti-abortion movement needed supreme court justices who would enact its agenda. They got their way with the help of the leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, who blocked President Obama from nominating a supreme court judge, leaving the field open for Trump to promote the anti-abortion Neil Gorsuch. After that came two more Trump-appointed justices: Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.That was the judicial assault on abortion rights. But that assault could only happen with the help of money … and lots of it. Luckily for the anti-abortion movement, there are plenty of wealthy foundations keen to fund the cause. They include the DeVos, Prince, and the Templeton Foundation, which have helped to support organisations such as the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the Heritage Foundation and Focus on the Family.Backed by billionaire funding, organisations such as the ADF took the fight against abortion rights to the courts – helping to secure a ban on buffer zones and so-called “partial birth abortion”, and supporting the notorious Hobby Lobby case, which stated that employers should not have to cover birth control on employees’ healthcare plans if it was against the owner’s religious beliefs.These organisations and their billionaire backers have transatlantic reach. Take the DeVos and Koch Foundation-supported Heritage Foundation, which has welcomed a range of Conservative MPs to discuss free speech – including Oliver Dowden, Priti Patel and Liam Fox. It was announced on the day of the supreme court leak that Lord David Frost would soon be addressing the organisation.Then there’s the ADF, which spent $23.3m in Europe between 2008 and 2019, when its European arm’s youth conference played host to the Conservative MP Fiona Bruce.ADF International intervened in Belfast’s notorious “gay cake” case and is allied with organisations that lobbied to further restrict abortion in Poland. The US anti-abortion legal organisation, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a second religious freedom organisation that takes on legal cases to challenge abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, has also operated in Europe. Set up by the Republican Pat Robertson, who famously accused feminism of turning women into lesbians, ACLJ’s chief counsel is a former Trump defence attorney, Jay Sekulow. ACLJ spent $15.7m in Europe from 2008-2019.So far you can see how big money, the judiciary and religious freedom movements have come together in the US and Europe. But there’s another active force that has pushed us towards the end of Roe: the far right.Across the far-right infosphere, men discuss the need to ban abortion in order to reverse what they term the “great replacement” – a conspiracy theory that posits white people are being “replaced” by migration from the global south, and that, in the US in particular, this replacement is aided by feminists repressing the white birthrate via abortion.Conspiracy theories such as the “great replacement” sound extreme. But when it comes to the US abortion row, such views are mainstream. Take this quote from the former Republican congressman Steve King, who represented Iowa between 2003-2021. He claimed “the US subtracts from its population a million of our babies in the form of abortion. We add to our population approximately 1.8 million of ‘somebody else’s babies’ who are raised in another culture before they get to us.” Far-right theories circulate globally – that’s why people outside the US shouldn’t just act in solidarity with American women at this time, but prepare to stand up against the possible erosion of their own hard-won rights.
      Sian Norris is the chief social and European affairs reporter at Byline Times. She is writing a book about the far-right attack on productive rights called Bodies Under Siege
      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.comTopicsRoe v WadeOpinionAbortionUS supreme courtWomenHealthUS politicsLaw (US)commentReuse this content More

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      Biden condemns efforts of extremist ‘Maga crowd’ to overturn Roe v Wade abortion protections – as it happened

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      US politics liveUS politicsBiden condemns efforts of extremist ‘Maga crowd’ to overturn Roe v Wade abortion protections – as it happened
      Biden: ‘This Maga crowd is really the most extreme political organization that exists in American history’
      How soon could states outlaw abortions if Roe v Wade is overturned?
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      Contraception could come under fire next
      California pledges to protect abortion rights
      What the justices have said and how they’ve voted on abortion
       Updated 1h agoRichard LuscombeWed 4 May 2022 16.09 EDTFirst published on Wed 4 May 2022 09.34 EDT Show key events onlyLive feedShow key events onlyFrom More

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      Advising women on abortions in 1960s New York | Letter

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      Advising women on abortions in 1960s New YorkJenny Wright recalls her time helping women from around the US who wanted abortions that were possible, though illegal I worked for the Abortion Law Reform Association in New York in 1968-69 (US shaken to its core by supreme court draft that would overturn Roe v Wade, 3 May). At that time, abortion was possible – but not legal – up to 12 weeks. My job was to scrutinise the hundreds of letters that poured in after an article in Life magazine that gave advice on obtaining an abortion in New York.I replied to all of them to weed out the women who were more than 12 weeks pregnant and advised them to go the UK. I remember that the majority of the letters were from other states. They were mostly from women who had more children than they could manage. Many were Roman Catholic and their husbands refused to let them use contraception. Very few were teenagers, though the common perception at the time was that only promiscuous young women wanted to use the services.My immediate superiors were arrested for committing a federal offence because we facilitated crossing state lines to commit a crime. I ceased working for them at that time, as I was British and a “registered alien”, and I would have been deported.Jenny WrightDublin, IrelandTopicsAbortionRoe v WadeWomenUS politicsGenderlettersReuse this content More

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      Here’s how Americans can fight back to protect abortion rights | Rebecca Solnit

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      Here’s how Americans can fight back to protect abortion rightsRebecca SolnitA Democratic majority in both houses of Congress could make abortion a right by law, and it’s worth remembering Mexico, Ireland and Argentina are among the countries that recently did so How do you strip away cherished rights? The best strategy is incrementally and undramatically, a death of a thousand cuts. That’s how Republicans were hacking at voting rights until recently, when the rest of us woke up and began to pay attention to the cumulative impact of voter ID laws, the shuttering of polling places, restrictions on voting by mail, and all the rest. Reproductive rights have been under attack for more than 30 years – by rightwing terrorism against abortion providers all through the 1990s and as recently as 2015 in Colorado Springs, but also by a sort of attrition, narrowing down access by shutting clinics, limiting how many weeks pregnant you can be, and other such measures. Overturning Roe v Wade upends all this stealth and incrementalism. Judging by the reaction, it may be exactly the kind of overstep that leads to a backlash. After all, the great majority of Americans support the right to choose.There are many kinds of actions to take in response to this likely overturning of a fundamental right to bodily self-determination and privacy. (And it’s bitterly amusing that a court that wants to set policies reaching into the uteruses of people across the country apparently feels violated by having its own internal workings exposed with this leaked draft opinion.) Direct support for the poor and unfree people who will be the most affected is already under way – and by unfree I mean those who are under the domination of a hostile partner, family, church or community. People have organized to offer travel to clinics for those far from them, access to abortion pills, and other forms of support. But by backlash I mean and am hoping for the kind of backlash Trump’s election and subsequent outrages provoked, the 2018 election that swept the Squad and many other progressives into office and took back the House of Representatives. A Democratic majority in both houses could make abortion a right by law, and it’s worth remembering that Mexico, Ireland and Argentina are among the countries that recently did so.What is striking this time around in the US both about the rightwing agenda and the response is that it is broad enough to build powerful coalitions. The human rights activism of the 1990s was siloed: though the same voters and politicians might support LGBTQ rights and reproductive rights and racial justice, largely separate campaigns were built around each of them, and the common denominators were seldom articulated.This time around – well, as I wrote when the news broke: “First they came for the reproductive rights (Roe v Wade, 1973) and it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a uterus in its ovulatory years, because then they want to come for the marriage rights of same-sex couples (Obergefell v Hodges, 2015), and then the rights of consenting adults of the same gender to have sex with each other (Lawrence v Texas, 2003), and then for the right to birth control (Griswold v Connecticut, 1965). It doesn’t really matter if they’re coming for you, because they’re coming for us.”“Us” these days means pretty much everyone who’s not a straight white Christian man with rightwing politics. They’re building a broad constituency of opposition, and it is up to us to make that their fatal mistake.It’s all connected. If Texas wasn’t suppressing voting rights so effectively, rightwing politicians might not be running the state. If non-Republican turnout can overcome the restrictions, Texas itself – now leading the attacks on abortion rights and trans rights – could elect Beto O’Rourke governor in November and turn Texas Democratic. O’Rourke tweeted today: “If they want states to decide, then we must elect a governor who will protect a woman’s right to abortion.”The right knows that it represents a minority and a shrinking minority as Americans as a whole become more progressive and as the country becomes increasingly non-white. They have made a desperate gamble – to rule via minority power, for the benefit of the few, which is why voter suppression is so crucial a part of their agenda. It cannot be a winning strategy in the long run. But in the short run it can perpetrate immense damage to too many lives and to the climate itself. The revelations should strengthen our resolve to resist by remembering our power and strengthening our alliances, winning elections, and keeping eyes on the prize.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
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