Text:Christine Henneberg; David Cole； Anne Enright； Sherrilyn Ifill； Sue Halpern； Translation/Gong Siliang
Editor's note: With Rowe v. Wade overturned by the Supreme Court, the decision could immediately lead to abortion being found illegal in 22 U.S. states, and millions of women are expected to lose access to abortion services. This article contains the comments of five authors on the Supreme Court's overturning of Rowe v. Wade after justice Alito's draft opinion was leaked. The authors lose reproductive freedom and autonomy from women; How the Justices moved the process with the politicization of the Supreme Court; The revelations behind the tragic history of Irish women losing their right to abortion; How the Republican Party suppressed the voting rights of minority female voters, further defending and consolidating the political decisions it made; How republicans formed an alliance with evangelicals and used women's bodies in exchange for political power examines the implications of the end of Rowe v. Wade. The pain of this decision will cause real harm to women, and what is even more desperate is that overturning Rowe v. Wade is likely not the ultimate goal of conservatives. This article was originally published in the New York Review of Books, with slight deletions from the Chinese translation.
On May 14, 2022, local time, Washington, D.C., usa, a march to defend the act protecting women's abortion rights was held.
Aspiration surgery
By Christine Henneberg, a writer and physician working on women's health and family planning.
The clinic where I work has no windows and there is a row of small square rooms in the hallway. In each room there was a table, a computer screen, a box of tissues, two chairs, and nothing else. This is where the clinic consultant meets patients who come to have an abortion.
Most of the work in these small rooms doesn't require my involvement. Counselors have a set of questions to ask each patient, but the conversations often don't follow the script. One woman started talking about her life: an argument with her partner, asthma for her young son, her sister's wedding next week, her mother's alcoholism. As long as she feels that these things are related to the operation, then it is all related. The counselor responded affirmatively with focused silence, sympathetic glances, and the occasional "Uh-huh, I get it." Ultimately, they'll talk about the most important specific question – are patients making their own decisions and are ready for today's surgery?
Eventually, most patients will walk through the hall to a larger operating room with a more clinical atmosphere. The operating room is equipped with a test bench, foot pedals, an electric suction device, sterile surgical equipment and an ultrasonic machine. I spend most of my day in these rooms doing suction surgery.
Aspiration is an efficient and relatively gentle way to empty the uterus. Surgical equipment consists of a medical tubule. Doctors use manual or electric suction to complete the procedure through circulating movements of the hand and wrist. Today, almost every doctor takes this approach for early miscarriage; This method is also used to deal with long-term or complicated miscarriages.
One or two patients feel hesitant every day, and it's like a small episode in the clinic. Before she had surgery, I would be called into a counseling room to review her case and talk to her.
Like most patients, she came to the clinic to have an abortion, or at least to know if she was eligible for an abortion. Unlike most of them, maybe she hasn't made a clear decision yet. She may have come because of some symptoms: she was bleeding and could have a miscarriage; She wanted to know what I could tell her, what options she had. It may also be that the nurse finds no signs of pregnancy in the uterus during the ultrasound, which increases the possibility of ectopic pregnancy.
After discussing the specifics, assuming they don't have an emergency (uncontrollable bleeding or symptoms of an ectopic pregnancy), I'll tell her that how we perform the surgery will depend on her goals and ideas. Is she sure she wants to terminate her pregnancy, or does she need more time to think about it? If she has already had a miscarriage, does she want to let the body drain the tissue on its own, or does she want to speed up the process with medication or suction surgery? Does she plan to discuss it all with her partner or lover, or is she planning to decide on her own?
Many women are often surprised that we spend so much time discussing these personal, non-clinical factors. When she asked me, "What advice do you have," I would tell her, "In this case, there's no real basis for medical advice." Any choice I propose is safe and reasonable. It's a personal decision. It's all up to you. ”
I saw the look in her eyes, as if to say: Are you kidding me, it's up to me? Sometimes it was a look of fear, at least at first. But it will inevitably translate into something else, an inquiring gaze. She was in front of me and went into a very private place inside. I couldn't get into it, but I gave her encouragement to listen to her voice— to stay away from the doctor, from the judgment and prejudice of friends and family, from the shouts of protesters in the parking lot. It's one of my favorite parts of my job: watching her go deep inside and then make a decision, a decision that belongs entirely to her.
She had come to have an abortion, and what she got, or rather the first thing she got, was an understanding of "abortion autonomy" and her vision of her future. With the overturning of Rowe v. Wade, these rights will cease to exist. Private conversations and suction surgeries in windowless rooms will disappear.
On June 24, 2022, local time, in San Antonio, Texas, a staff member was incredulous after hearing the news that the Supreme Court overturned Roy v. Wade, and the Alamo Women's Reproductive Service Center closed the abortion service.
The unscrupulous majority
Author: David Cole, National Director of Law at the American Civil Liberties Union; George J. Mitchell Professor of Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University Law Center.
The conventional wisdom is that one cannot judge a Supreme Court judge by his or her performance in the first few years because they are not yet aware of the terrible powers and responsibilities they have. It usually takes a while for a new justice to adjust to his position and to tread carefully in the process.
That's not the case, however, for the three Justices Trump appointed: Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, who have been on the Supreme Court for a year, three and five years, respectively. If justice Samuel Alito's draft opinion leaked in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization is true, the three justices will collectively overturn the Supreme Court's decision. It is this decision, which has lasted for more than half a century, that protects women's fundamental right to control their bodies and destiny.
The new justices have many reasons to put aside their support for this radical decision. For fifty years, most Supreme Court judges have applied for and reaffirmed Rowe v. Wade. Thirty years ago, the Supreme Court rejected a clear request to overturn the verdict in the case, stressing the particular importance of following precedent and the central implications of access to abortion for women's equal status. President Donald Trump's promise to appoint a judge who can overturn rowe v. Wade's decision is also worth reflecting on. This touchstone test politicizes the Supreme Court, and its legitimacy depends on whether it can surpass Trump's favored, naked political maneuvers.
These are only legal questions. It was also argued that judges should carefully consider the decision, which "would have disastrous consequences for half the country," because women would lose one of the most important decisions an individual can make, namely the right to have children (in fact, men would also benefit from being able to plan with their partners whether and when to have children). While all women will lose their constitutional rights, the most vulnerable groups in our society: young women without financial resources, women with difficult family situations, and women of color will feel the harm immediately.
Justice Alito's draft insists that there is nothing wrong with overturning constitutional precedents, as some of the Supreme Court's most prominent opinions have done so. Brown v. Board of Education Board of Education overturned 58 years ago, Plessy v. Ferguson. The principle of "separate but equal" declared in Ferguson. In total, Alito has cited about 30 court rulings overturning precedent. But what is most striking is that the vast majority of decisions expand the rights. A few rulings have downplayed the protection of rights, but none have eliminated a right altogether. Ultimately, Alito's lengthy list only proves how "unprecedented" it would be if the Supreme Court eliminated a long-established right.
Moreover, the impact of Alato's reasoning is not limited to abortion. He insisted that only when those rights were "rooted in the history and traditions of the country" should the courts protect rights not expressly provided for in the Constitution. But in fact, the "almost all of the constitutional rights" we enjoy today go beyond what "history and tradition" have recognized. In fact, the framers used open-ended terms such as "freedom," "due process," and "equal protection" to allow and even encourage this evolution.
If we reduce our rights to the rights that people enjoyed when the Bill of Rights was passed in 1791, or even to the rights they enjoyed when the Civil War Amendment was added at the end of the 19th century, many of the rights we take for granted will be threatened. The Equal Protection Clause did not prohibit sex discrimination or racial segregation when it was ratified in 1868. Nor does "freedom" protected by due process provisions include the right to "use contraception" or "free choice of sexual partner or spouse without restriction of sex or race."
Alito said abortion is different from other "freedoms" in that it "destroys ... the 'potential life.'" But this distinction has no logical connection to his reasoning. The rule he announced was that rights, which were not specifically mentioned in the Constitution, would be recognized only if they were rooted in history and tradition, and not only "rights that impede potential life" would be restricted.
Finally, Alito rashly assessed the impact of the ruling on women. He denied that repealing the abortion law would violate equal protection, noting that not all women were pregnant. But according to this theory, a law that does not apply to patients with sickle cell anemia, which occurs mostly in the black community, would not constitute racial discrimination. He also said there is no way to know whether women rely on the rights declared in Rowe v. Wade to plan their lives, families and careers, and this fact is clearly undeniable.
The decision is not final. But if the court insists on this outcome, it will be the work of a truly radical majority, tantamount to a crude exercise of power to take away one of their most important rights from half the population.
The painful experience of Ireland
Author: Anne Enright, Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin.
On a sunny day in 2018, when Ireland's abortion ban was finally lifted, Irish women danced, sang and cheered on the grounds of Dublin Castle. I wasn't there, I wasn't dancing, I was staying at home, crying at my computer keyboard, thinking about the future of my kids. The struggle for bodily autonomy has been too long and hurtful, and I have not done enough in this regard.
In 1983, the Irish referendum passed the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, which recognizes "the recognition of the equal right to the life of an unborn fetus." These rights will be guaranteed and defended by law, taking due account of the equal right to life of pregnant mothers and where feasible". Ultimately, all Irish women who needed an abortion, for whatever reason, including medical reasons, had to travel to England for surgery.
It took many years for me to question whether the term "mother" should be used as a legal term. Isn't "mother" a relationship? What about the "pregnant person"? Perhaps we can start by using the word instead of choosing "mother," the most binding word in English.
In many of the debates that followed the 1983 vote, people talked about victims of rape, victims of incestuous rape, victims of statutory rape; With regard to women with learning difficulties, women in coma, women with treatable cancers, women with fatally deformed fetuses, women at risk of death at the time of miscarriage. These women are referred to as "mothers" by the Irish Constitution and the Catholic Church, and their plight is not the point. The "right to life" clause has nothing to do with the social environment, it has nothing to do with the actual situation with regard to medical treatment. It doesn't even have to do with individual consent, because psychology is irrelevant. Pregnancy is a kind of self-destruction. Through pregnancy, a person can be seen as both a "miracle" and a "powerless flesh."
However, the debate is necessary and continues: the right to life is an idea, but the human body is not an abstract space. In 1992, Ireland held another referendum to clarify the "mother's equal right to life". At the time, a 14-year-old girl who became pregnant after being raped developed suicidal tendencies under the care of the state, and a plan to take her to the UK for an abortion was brought before the Irish Supreme Court. Ireland's Supreme Court allowed her to travel, but shortly after the verdict, she miscarried. However, the case raised a series of questions that the Irish people eventually confronted. Can the "risk of self-destruction" be counted as a reason to allow abortion? The Irish people saw the brutality of the issue, with 65 per cent voting yes.
Can you imagine leaving your mark on a paper ballot asking you to tease out the problems behind the fact that a raped child is having a hard time ending his or her own life? I felt very sick and my hands were shaking. I felt completely defeated, and although I voted, I did not march, argue, speak or protest. In 1992, I couldn't find a way out of this argument, in part because there was no way out of this argument, which was framed by the other side.
Why argue? Middle-class women choose to travel to get abortion services. In 2001, the pill came out afterwards, even though women had to pay doctors and make the experience embarrassing to buy it. Still, women suffer in silence, and no one even knows their names. Some women died and the courts heard some tricky cases, but their names were replaced by A, C, X, with legal testimony.
Savita Halappanavar died in a hospital in Galway in 2012 when she did not receive proper care for a miscarriage because the hospital cared only about fetuses that were doomed to fail. Her husband, Praveen, asked, "Why don't they set their sights on adult lives?" The problem is so normal, so self-evident, that it makes the equal rights of the "unborn" seem like a desperate abstraction. For Plavin, who grew up in India, the hard truth for him was that Catholic Ireland had a great "knowledge" of life, and his wife died for it.
Ireland's abortion ban has failed both medically and practically. This ban has made people's lives more difficult and dangerous. However, the shift in public opinion that led to the repeal of the Act did not come from legal, moral or religious arguments; The shift happened because Savita Halapanavar's name was known, and her photograph appeared on the news as well as on placards – may she rest in peace. Later, the living women wrote their names into stories about abortion, and a strong taboo was broken. In 2018, more than three-quarters of Irish voters said personal stories about abortion told by the media or acquaintances had an impact on them.
However, when the Irish people finally voted in favour of allowing abortion, my feelings were not simple, it was all too toxic. I need to express my condolences for those difficult years. My 18 year old daughter doesn't know why I'm crying. For her, the questions couldn't have been clearer. She was excited because she could vote, and her first vote went to the winning side.
On June 25, 2022, local time, in Washington, D.C., abortion rights activists protested outside the Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling allowing states to regulate abortion sparked a frenzied travel craze across the country, with people directing patients to states that still allow abortion.
Steal the jewel in your crown
Author: Sherrilyn Ifill, civil rights lawyer and scholar.
For American women, Rowe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey) ended catastrophically. However, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, Judge Alito concluded his draft opinion with a seemingly optimistic, but in fact callous, prediction of the potential impact of the ruling. He did not directly address the pain that the court's ruling would cause, but rather used it as a "benevolent" gift to women voters in the states. He said it would "return the issue of abortion to the legislature" and allow "women with different positions on abortion to influence the legislative process". To underscore this, he reminds us that "women are not without suffrage or political power." ”
Many people in both parties would be inclined to endorse the declaration, and it is true that women in some states are able to mobilize their electoral forces to protect abortion rights. But in many states, especially in the South, this is not the case: there are still a large number of black women living there. Therefore, in reading the draft opinion, we must consider the damaging voting jurisprudence of the Supreme Court and its impact on the suffrage of black women.
The Supreme Court held Shelby County v. Shelby County v. 2013. Holder) ruled to remove key protections under section 4 of the Voting Rights Act and overturned the pre-approval formula under section 5 of the act, which states that jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination must submit proposed electoral changes to federal authorities for approval before enactment. This provision makes the Voting Rights Act the crown jewel of civil rights legislation because it establishes a system that prevents discriminatory acts from becoming law. In shelby, the court rejected the use of pre-approval formulas, possibly in an attempt to minimize damage by emphasizing that black voters are free to challenge discriminatory electoral laws after they have been enacted, and that they can appeal under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act against electoral laws and discriminatory practices that weaken or disenfranchise minorities.
Since then, black women have had to overcome a series of accelerating and increasingly complex voter repression programs that have proliferated at an alarming rate. Even as the Dobbs draft circulated, the ability of black and Latino women to vote (and whether their votes could be counted) was threatened by georgia, Texas, and Florida passed laws that suppressed voters. Those laws have been challenged by civil rights groups in the lawsuit, but those issues are unlikely to be fully resolved before this year's Congressional and state midterm elections.
Black female voters have shown incredible resilience, reaching record turnout among Democratic voters in the 2020 presidential and 2021 Georgia special elections. During the 2020 presidential primaries, black voters lined up in a nine-hour line in Fulton County, Georgia, at the height of the pandemic. The patriotism and determination of these voters received a "key reward" from the Georgia Republican Party, which enacted a new set of voter repression laws that stipulate that "providing water or refreshments to voters in line" would be criminalized.
People can bring lawsuits under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act against this law and other elements of the newly enacted law on voter suppression. However, these proceedings will not be assessed using the "criteria for reviewing complaints filed under article 2" over the past 40 years. Because in the summer of 2021, in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, Justice Alito personally announced a new, more restrictive test to evaluate complaints under Section 2 that ignored the criteria clearly articulated by Congress and used by lower courts for decades. Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissenting opinion that Alito's majority opinion was simply "impossible to strip". But the latter doesn't seem to care. Just a month ago, a federal trial court in Alabama painstakingly explained in detail the racist characteristics of a blatantly racist constituency (the American political term for manipulating an election in favor of one party) in this year's midterm elections. The court pronounced a decision on a "shadow docket," a decision that was promptly rendered on an urgent matter without going through a full trial process, without a full supreme court opinion, and with adequate notification or verbal arguments by the parties.
These decisions made it more difficult for black women to exercise their right to vote, which, according to Alito, was a means by which women gained the right to abortion. But when Alito claims to put the future of abortion in the hands of female voters, he denies court-fueled political deprivation of black and Latino women. So, who exactly does he mean by women who hold the right to vote? The establishment of the draft opinion means that the courts will restrict the basic privacy rights of black women, while dismantling the tools we have to protect our political power.
Before the Fall
Written by Sue Halpern, a contributing writer for The New Yorker and a regular contributor to the New York Review. Resident Scholar of Middlebury College, USA.
The day before Samuel Alito's "regressive" Supreme Court draft opinion was leaked, I happened to be on a plane watching "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," a 2021 film that fictionalizes the ups and downs of Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker, one of America's most important evangelical Christian couples.
In a 1985 scene, Jerry Falwell, an older, more mature and politically savvy television evangelist, is taken to Fort Mill, South Carolina, where Jim Barker is building a Christian theme park. As they jolted all the way in their jeep, Farwell told Buck, "Vice President Bush counted on us to help Reagan in 1988 as he had in the past." Without us, the Republicans can't win. You need to understand how strong we are in this battle for the soul of our country. ”
In the film, Farwell's "fight for the soul of the nation" refers to the fight against homosexuality and AIDS. He insisted that "this 'gay cancer' is affecting our country and our families". In fact, the fight began as early as 1979, when Farwell was persuaded to use abortion to feed the Republican Party white evangelicals.
At the time, evangelicals were largely unconcerned about politics; Nor will they vote as an organized group. Religious scholar Randall Ballmer notes that even in 1976, three years after the passage of Rowe v. Wade, the Southern Baptist Church reaffirmed a resolution first adopted in 1971 urging its members to fight for legislation that would allow abortion in cases of rape, incest, evidence of obvious fetal deformities, and confirmation of evidence that could damage the mother's emotional, mental and physical health.
But Republican strategist Paul Weyrich understands that by holding on to evangelicals, the presidency can be handed over to Ronald Reagan and the future of the Republican Party can be cemented.
By the late 1970s, as I've documented, Farwell feared democrats would revoke tax-exempt status for white-only colleges, including his own college in Lynchburg, Virginia. These white-only colleges were evangelical colleges established in the South in response to the federal government's forced desegregation. As Balmer argues: Veridge knows that Republicans need to appeal for something more socially acceptable than racism. The debate over "killing babies" has become a cunning trick to attract voters and perpetuate racial discrimination.
Before republicans formed an alliance with evangelicals, Republicans were generally not opposed to abortion. In 1967, as governor, Reagan signed the California Therapeutic Abortion Act, one of the freest abortion laws in the United States at the time. Five years later, a Gallup poll found that nearly 70 percent of Republicans said only women and her doctors, not the government, should be involved in the decision to terminate pregnancies. But after Verich forged ties with evangelicals, Republican voters, along with Reagan and George W. Bush, were elected to the U.S. H· Prominent Republican politicians such as W. Bush became overt supporters of the anti-abortion campaign. They used women's bodies in exchange for political power.
At this moment, nearly half a century after the Supreme Court established women's right to privacy and bodily integrity through Rowe v. Wade, there has been an inversion of the cart before the horse — evangelicals have included republicans, who have incited anger and passed laws in many states that make it harder for voters, especially voters of color, to vote. This approach has given the right-wing minority more political power than the majority, and the Supreme Court is full of justices appointed to pursue the Christian agenda. It's like dominoes, and what many people don't realize is that the overthrow of Rowe v. Wade is likely not the end of the game.
Editor-in-Charge: Shen Guanzhe
Proofreader: Yan Zhang