In a blow to women’s reproductive health and justice, a leaked draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization makes it clear the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade. The constitutional right to privacy and the liberty interest of the 14th Amendment, the legal underpinnings of Roe, are now at risk in all aspects of women’s reproductive lives. Although Roe is embedded in the middle of a hundred years of jurisprudence which the Planned Parenthood v. Casey court calls the “realm of personal liberty that the government can’t enter,” it appears the Court is disregarding these precedential decisions.
In fact, an ominous aspect of the leaked draft opinion by Justice Alito is its repudiation of the legal analysis of the constitutional right to privacy and guarantee of personal liberty as “egregiously wrong.” Employing the reasoning in the draft Dobbs opinion, the Supreme Court lays the groundwork for states, not people, to make decisions about whom to marry, how to raise your kids, the use of contraception, and the ability to terminate a pregnancy.
As soon as the US Supreme Court overrules Roe v. Wade, the right to decide to have an abortion will be banned in over half the states, and criminalized in many. Louisiana has already proposed that abortion be classified as homicide. 13 states have trigger laws ready in place.
What is it like for women when abortions are illegal? the vast majority of people living in the US have never known abortion to be outright banned as a crime. They have no reference point of not being able to make a life-altering personal decision that had always been their fundamental right. In Stand UP, Speak OUT Episode 3: Reproductive Rights – Abortion, three women spanning three generations, from differing socio-economic backgrounds, share their experiences before and after abortion was legalized in 1973 – discovering their contraception had failed, and, facing the options available to them.
“May no one ever know what it was like to have an illegal abortion,” says one woman.
