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Growing up during the 1980s and 1990s, my second-wave feminist mother, writer Erica Jong, was obsessed with Roe v. Wade. Born in 1942, she came of age in a world without safe legal abortion. She knew what was at stake with the 1973 ruling that protected a woman’s right to choose “without excessive government restriction.” Roe v. Wade was a huge victory for my mother’s generation. They could point to the Supreme Court decision as something tangible they did; their blood and sweat had changed the calculus of women’s lives. “No more women will die of back-alley abortions,” my mother would say. “No more wire hangers.”
When Trump came down that gold escalator on June 16, 2015, to announce his presidential run, there was speculation that a thrice-married adulterer might even be pro-choice. But that was before he said, “There has to be some form of punishment for abortion.” Trump even said that he would install two Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, telling the polymaths at Fox & Friends, “It’s certainly possible. And maybe they do it in a different way. Maybe they’d give it back to the states. You just don’t know what’s going to happen.”
The irony is, Roe v. Wade is popular. A NPR/PBS poll released in 2019 showed that 77% of Americans believed that the Supreme Court should uphold Roe v. Wade. And making abortion illegal doesn’t actually prevent it. As Zara Ahmed writes, “Abortion rates are actually four times higher in low-income countries where abortion is prohibited than in high-income countries where it is broadly legal.”
This week, the dynamic in this long debate took on new dimensions when the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that could and likely will result in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, is a chance for the Supreme Court to rule on the Mississippi law that forbids abortions after 15 weeks. The law was largely created in order to be kicked up to the Supreme Court and give conservatives the opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade. Previously, it had ruled that bans on abortion before viability—about 24 weeks—were unconstitutional. A decision here would open the door to other conservative states being able to ban abortion.
It’s worth noting that Mississippi is the poorest state in the nation, with a poverty rate of almost 20%. Many of the women who live in Mississippi cannot afford take a day off of work in order to drive to another state for an abortion. But Governor Tate Reeves is way more interested in regulating women’s uteruses than helping his constituents.
The reality is that Donald Trump has dramatically changed the makeup of the Supreme Court. NPR’s Nina Totenberg sums it up best: “The court now has a 6–3 conservative supermajority, with all six having taken positions hostile to abortion rights at one time or another, and the newest justice, Barrett, the most outspoken critic of abortion before joining the high court.”
But before next fall, when the Supreme Court takes up Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (it will likely deliver its ruling the following summer), before any of that happens, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas has already been emboldened by this new conservative “supermajority” to push the infringements on women’s rights even further. On Wednesday of this week, Governor Abbot signed an antiabortion bill that would ban abortion after six weeks. (This was the same day, by the way, that his state executed Quintin Jones, a man who was convicted of killing his great-aunt and whose relatives had pleaded for clemency. So much for the sanctity of life.) Six weeks is a mere two weeks after a missed period, when many women don’t even know that they’re pregnant—but then, that’s the idea. The law also “essentially empowers private citizens to enforce the law by suing abortion providers, whether or not those citizens are connected to a patient,” according to the Texas Tribune.
Governor Abbot is extremely concerned about the “life” of an embryo the size of a sweet pea, but he’s less worried about those 151 Texans who died during the 2021 winter when the Texas power grid froze after years of deregulation. The AP reported at the time that, “Many homes went without power or drinkable water for days after subfreezing temperatures, failing power plants, and record demand for heat pushed Texas’ electric grid to the breaking point,” but then they weren’t embryos, so.
The Trump Supreme Court, then, is going to overturn Roe v. Wade. The die is cast; the course is set. We need to be clear-eyed about what’s coming. Wealthy women in blue states will be okay. They will have access to safe, legal abortions—but they always (or almost always) have. The women who will suffer are the women who always suffer.
“The impact of whatever the Supreme Court decides to do, will be felt by people who are already subject to criminalization and lack of access,” says executive director of We Testify Renee Bracey Sherman, “people of color, trans and nonbinary people, and undocumented immigrants among others, anybody who already has a difficult time getting the care that they need. We’re already seeing the impact of these restrictions and have for the past decade. Our nation is already unjustly punishing people for self-managing their abortions and miscarriages and stillbirths.”
We see what’s coming, a public health nightmare for women. As Katha Pollitt writes in The Atlantic, “In 1971, the year after decriminalization, the maternal-mortality rate in New York State dropped 45%.” This isn’t some philosophical conversation about when life begins; it has real-world consequences for people who are actually alive. Women in Mississippi, in Texas, in Louisiana—women who can’t afford an unplanned pregnancy—will die. History tells us that making abortion illegal doesn’t prevent abortion; it just prevents safe abortion. I think of my mother’s generation and how hard they fought for us to have control over our bodies. They thought women would never have to die from unsafe abortions; sadly, they were wrong.