Overturning Roe v. Wade takes away our right to choose the lives we want

I was born 10 months after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a woman’s right to obtain an abortion in the 1973 landmark case of Roe v. Wade.

If, God forbid, I’d ever been raped in an alley, on a date, by a family member, or heck, a priest and conceived a child, abortion was a medical decision that was mine to make. I started having sex in my early 20s, and if my birth control failed and I became pregnant, I would have ended it. An unplanned pregnancy would have ended my career. To have a baby you want is a blessing. To have a baby you don’t want is a curse. Having the option used to be American. It’s not anymore.

The Supreme Court’s egregious 6-3 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization, released Friday, overturns Roe, snatching from me my constitutional right to end a pregnancy. It’s now up to state legislators to determine whether abortions are legal in each state. Abortion is now banned in nine states, 12 more states are likely to prohibit and/or restrict abortion.

In nine other states, the future of abortion is uncertain. This list includes Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, who promised to protect women’s right to chose in the Keystone State as long as he’s in office, but his term ends in January and the state’s Republican-led legislature is already lining up bills designed to roll back reproductive rights.

The Dobbs decision marks the first time the Supreme Court has dismantled a federal law that guaranteed the personal freedom of such a large swath of American citizens. It also signals how the court intends to handle settled law, cases that have been on the books for so long, they define the American experience. Some of these laws impact access to contraceptives (Griswold v. Connecticut) and marriage laws (Loving v. Virginia,) especially for people who are gay (Obergefell v. Hodges).

It doesn’t seem to matter to the justices that the majority of Americans approve of the laws the way they stood. According to a NPR/PBS Marist National Poll, 56% of Americans oppose the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. The Republican Party continues to do as they please as they redefine what it means to live in America and control our lives as if they are God. Free will be damned.

I am beyond petrified. I’m not nostalgic for previous decades. I have been writing columns since the late ‘90s, advocating for Black people and women’s rights. Privacy rights, especially those that guaranteed I had agency over my reproductive health, were part of what it meant to be American. That’s just not true anymore. People coming behind me — especially those who are Black and brown — are at further disadvantage, left with a country that is increasingly less equal. The ruling implies it is most important that a person who gets pregnant carries the fetus to term. It doesn’t matter if they can’t afford it, or may die in the process, or simply doesn’t want to.

“One of the things I find the most distressing about this is the voices and the experiences of women and girls are totally absent,” said Tobias Barrington Wolff, the Jefferson B. Fordham professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. “This opinion doesn’t even try to take seriously what it would be like for young women to suddenly live in a world in which they are trying to make decisions about their relationships, education, and professional lives and they won’t be able to make those same decisions about their reproductive lives.”

Abortion-rights advocates and politicians point to precedent. We’ve had generations of women like me who factored the right to chose how motherhood would work into their life plans. “What the court says here,” Wolff said, is that “precedent is important only in part that people can rely on it. What the court thinks matters in concrete forms of reliance applies only to property and contract rights.”

When women were property — whether as wives or enslaved — men had the final say on all of their life’s decisions, including choosing motherhood and getting an education. It wasn’t until the 1970s that a woman could get her own credit card. And, according to the 2020 U.S. Census, women still only earn 83 cents for every dollar a man makes.

In the 50 years since Roe, women have made momentous strides toward equality. We are more likely to leave abusive relationships, finish our education, and live independently. This is not because we stopped having sex or men have stopped forcing themselves on us. It’s because we have the freedom to choose the way our lives unfold. When politics gets in the way of basic personal freedoms, such as when to become a parent, society is in grave danger.

“What it does is strengthen the social arrangements where men are the ones who have options,” Wolff said. “Men are the ones who are able to exercise those options with greater freedom.”

In the Dobbs opinion, written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., he called Roe a bad law. He also wrote that because abortion isn’t explicitly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, it shouldn’t be protected by it. In his footnotes, Alito cited statistics suggesting Black women were the victims of abortion, pointing to 2019 CDC report stating 38% of all women in the U.S. who had abortions identify as Black.

Alito didn’t address any of the other inequities Black women face that would force them to want to seek the procedure. Black women are more likely to die in childbirth, because we are more prone to health conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes. And the saddest reason of all, doctors are less likely to take Black women’s concerns seriously. According to the most recent U.S. Census data, Black women are paid 36% less than white men and 20% less than white women.

To Republicans, pay equality and health-care equity only matter to fetuses. God help them when they are born.

“This is very scary to me,” said Loren Cahill, a 29-year-old Black woman, a Ph.D., and assistant professor at Smith College’s School of Social work who also serves as a scholar-in-residence at the Colored Girls Museum in Germantown. “I’ve always had agency over my body. And to lose this agency, seemingly overnight, it just seems unfair.”

In this new America, women could likely face criminal charges if they make the very personal decision to end their pregnancy. Smartphone apps like Flo, that track a woman’s menstrual cycle can, and likely will, be dragged into court. And citizens in many states, like Texas, are encouraging citizens to turn women over to the police who are suspected of having abortions. It is reminiscent of the laws that encouraged citizens in states like Texas to alert authorities upon learning that a Black person could read. Yet, I can’t do anything if someone sits next to me on a train without a mask in the middle of a worldwide health pandemic, or brings a gun to a public park.

This is a well-orchestrated plan to roll back abortion rights as well as many of the rights that are fundamental to Americans and under equal protection, said Kadida Kenner, the CEO and president of the New Pennsylvania Project and cochair of the Pennsylvania arm of Why Courts Matter.

The Trump administration, Kenner said, stacked the lower courts with conservative judges, including several who “would not conform the correctness of the Brown v. Board of Education,” citing 21 judges including Pa. Western District Court Judge Nicholas Ranjan. What will happen, Kenner said, is that hard-fought rights like same-sex marriage, access to birth control, and equal access to education that were once celebrated because they stood as proof America was becoming a more fair country for all are in danger of being struck down. We remain a country where the minority population controls the joy of the majority of its residents and citizens.

Justices like Alito are using the courts to take what they call corrective measures and change laws that once protected all citizens, but are especially important to Black people.

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court decided Thursday in the case Vega v. Tekoh that police officers cannot be sued under the federal civil rights law for failing to administer Miranda rights, once settled law under the 1966 decision Miranda v. Arizona. Individual states can now decide whether or not a person’s conversation with an arresting officer is admissible in court if his rights aren’t read to him.

Even more alarming, if a person is unaware of their right to an attorney, they may not ask for one. We know that police officers use violence on citizens, especially Black men. This decision gives trigger-happy officers license to violate an American’s civil rights with no accountability.

Speaking of trigger happy, in the midst of record gun violence, including a mass shooting on South Street that killed three and wounded 11, the Supreme Court on Thursday also struck down a 100-year-old New York gun law that placed restrictions on carrying concealed weapons outside the home, strengthening federal protections of gun owners. Meanwhile, the House on Friday voted in favor of sweeping bipartisan legislation that, among other measures, includes more thorough background checks for people ages 18 to 21. And although President Biden signed the measure, once a person is cleared to carry a gun, what’s to stop them from carrying it to state fairs, malls, voting sites, and government buildings if the states don’t prevent them from doing so?

Republican extremists will say that Black people, women, and Democrats are alarmists. They will deflect and call us racists for suggesting that some conservatives want to live in a country where the only people who have the right to pursue happiness on their own terms are white men. But what are we left to think when so many of this year’s Supreme Court rulings reflect an America where guns were plenty, Black people couldn’t vote, and women were property?