Roe v Wade overturned

Why will they target contraception next?
Because this is the religiously-backed patriarchy and they hate women, and they see sex outside marriage as essentially sinful and therefore punishable for women. (But OK/forgivable for men, because men are always right in the patriarchy). Pregnancies and birth from sinful sex are a price that women must pay. Not men. The concept and shame of illegitimacy for kids will come back in, creating a two-tier hierarchy for children, with disastrous consequences for the welfare of illegitimate children.

And in this patriarchal world view, women having sex in marriage is for women having babies, so for them, having access to contraception is not necessary.

Women having sex outside marriage shouldn’t have any access to contraception because it will only tempt/encourage/unfairly allow them to get away with doing something sinful without punishment. So contraception for unmarried women is not necessary. Contraception is unnecessary.

Honestly I think we can’t even imagine how far this could go. My utmost sympathy to American women. Whichever US state they are in this will affect them more or less acutely, because it’s going to cause political chaos, social division and female death.

Remember how we all posted on here in sympathy last summer for Afghan women after the Americans left and the Taliban just strolled back in to take power and then they’ve immediately banned women from jobs, girls from school and god knows what else that we don’t even hear about? This feels very similar.

Perhaps this has already been shared but it bears sharing again

amp.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jun/22/us-woman-left-traumatised-after-malta-hospital-refuses-life-saving-abortion

But looking at the strategy pro-choice groups have pursued on this, it's difficult to see how they are thinking they will achieve what they want. Ultimately if they want robust laws passed they need to convince people that their POV is the truth or most pragmatic, and their approach and rhetoric doesn't typically contribute to that. Even if they directly lobby politicians that will not be a long term effective strategy if they do not convince many regular people. Most Americans favour or at least would accept very moderate abortion laws, not unlike the UK or much of Europe, but that is rarely what the pro-choice lobby presents as the goal. They don't want all abortion banned, nor do they want abortion at any point for any reason to be legal.

I agree. I was startled when reading a discussion on this topic on ovarit that posters there would not consider my position pro choice at all. They wanted nothing less than a right to abortion on demand at any point up to term.

In the UK of course we have no right to abortion on demand. Abortion is only legal to protect the physical or mental health of the mother and must be signed off by two doctors and only up to 24 weeks. The focus is on the health and life of the pregnant women.

Whilst I would prefer that medical abortion could be accessed as easily as the morning after pill I am comfortable with the cut off at viability for surgical abortion. Despite the laws as they stand here in the UK I do not know any woman who couldn’t get an abortion if that was what she wanted (I am in England, I know the situation is not the same in Northern Ireland) and nearly 90% of all abortions in the UK happen in the first 10 weeks. Other countries in Europe have variations on this. I don’t think abortion on demand up to term is legal anywhere, is it? At term surely we are talking about induction of labour and that baby is going to live unless some action usually considered criminal is taken. I didn’t understand their position at all. Once a baby can survive ex utero I can’t see that abortion as a concept is ethical. I don’t know what they imagine that would actually be like, an abortion after viability and up to term. I couldn’t ask because the thread was closed.

Anyway I wonder if seeking some kind of compromise would, in practice, serve American women better than trying to make the case for abortion on demand at any point which the ovarit rad fems were arguing for. The case has to be made now state by state to save women’s lives and to protect their mental and physical health, and to give them safe reproductive choices.

‘If the Right don't want women to have unwanted pregnancies that might end up being terminated, why wouldn't they want to make contraception easy to obtain and freely available? It's not like the Right in the US are all Catholics, so what is motivating this?’

To a certain type of religious fundamentalist, there are ‘roles’ people are meant to fulfil. Women are meant to be mothers. Men are meant to be in charge. Contraception fiddles with god’s plan.

Whilst I understand that the foot soldiers in this are the religious right, I believe that following the money is key. There is more money to be made in completing a pregnancy, giving birth especially with maximum intervention whether needed or not, selling a baby, selling everything for caring for a baby whether it is needed or not than in women having reproductive control over their own bodies. I think the big movers behind the scenes will be those who stand to make money from this especially the health, pharma and adoption industries.

@ShinyRainbow what are you on? No. Whatever you're wittering about, it's not relevant.

But hey, at least they know what a woman is!

It's not like the Right in the US are all Catholics, so what is motivating this?

The base of the Republican Party has a large segment of white Evangelical Christians. Their views on women's rights are more dismal than those of most Catholics.

Here's one explanation about this. It's based on the underlying concepts being the same in Roe v. Wade and in the decision that guaranteed right to contraception.

Can anyone explain why the Supreme Court will target contraception next? It doesn't make sense to me.

If the Right don't want women to have unwanted pregnancies that might end up being terminated, why wouldn't they want to make contraception easy to obtain and freely available? It's not like the Right in the US are all Catholics, so what is motivating this?

Someone asked about why nothing was done by Congress to pass federal
protections for abortion. My opinion is that the reason is our elected officials didn’t want to take the risk of making anyone mad. They didn’t want to risk their own power, so they all played kick the can for 5 decades.

I believe that most of the members of Congress in BOTH parties understand why abortion should be legal. I suspect most of them have no strong desire to prevent abortion, they simply didn’t want to deal with it. And if I’m right, that’s perhaps even more despicable than those that just don’t get it.

American here and really appreciate this thread.

I’m in shock. Never thought this would happen. I am angry at Congress because as someone else mentioned, they knew Roe v Wade was vulnerable to being overturned and have done nothing, for decades now.

It was a devout Catholic woman who was also a nurse that explained to me when I was a teenager exactly why abortion must remain legal. Why it’s not a choice anyone can make for a woman. Why Is better hope I never find myself having to make such a decision and to never ever judge a woman who does.

Thanks, TheBiology. I really appreciate it! It's been a tough day.

The (small d) democratic deficit is huge and the unwieldy electoral structures in place make it difficult to address

This is exactly right, and it affects every single issue. It's really bleak.

Apologies, Grinitch, I didn't mean to cause offence and should have more accurately said "I think that's the actual SCOTUS priorities on these issues". The reversal of Roe v Wade is not the fault of American women and girls, who certainly weren't "asking for this", and they have my sympathy.

The US isn't a "shithole", but it is definitely an outlier amongst the major countries in the developed world when it comes to the proportion and influence of religious believers and the levels of (and restrictions on) gun ownership. The (small d) democratic deficit is huge and the unwieldy electoral structures in place make it difficult to address - something that is certainly familiar to those of us in the UK, where a government with a large parliamentary majority was elected with less than 40% of the popular vote.

In the UK, the threat from the religious right is largely non-existent but the drift towards a populist, authoritarian, undemocratic, and unaccountable style of government is real and given the eastward flow of political and cultural influences across the Atlantic this is no time for complacency.

Unfortunately, Ovarit is also vulnerable. The way some of these laws have been drafted, any site that provides information or contains posts linking to resources or funding or offers of assistance of any kind are subject to warrants for disclosure so that posters can be prosecuted.

I'm not being paranoid. I can't express the degree to which all of these avenues are being scrutinized and the power that has been assigned to the parties concerned.

And identity politics is to blame for the lack of equality legislation there too. It was blocked by transactivists because of a row over including gender identity.

Profoundly sad today. I can't believe the world I'm living in. On so many fronts I'm seeing hate for women, I feel as though we're drowning in it. Where is the light at the end of the tunnel?

Roe v Wade was never a strong legal decision and that was known all along. It was always a foolish strategy on the part of pro-choice campaigners to put so much weight on it. They should have been either pushing for congress to make a law, or what was likely to be more successful, work at the state level. The US is a union of fairly independent states which is a political arrangement with consequences, one being that quite a lot of things are decided at a state level rather than national level.

The idea that some Americans don't want it "wholly repealed" only shows that they don't understand what the decision said or why.

But looking at the strategy pro-choice groups have pursued on this, it's difficult to see how they are thinking they will achieve what they want. Ultimately if they want robust laws passed they need to convince people that their POV is the truth or most pragmatic, and their approach and rhetoric doesn't typically contribute to that. Even if they directly lobby politicians that will not be a long term effective strategy if they do not convince many regular people. Most Americans favour or at least would accept very moderate abortion laws, not unlike the UK or much of Europe, but that is rarely what the pro-choice lobby presents as the goal. They don't want all abortion banned, nor do they want abortion at any point for any reason to be legal.

Depressing beyond belief. The seed of this was sown with identity politics. It tore up the US Presidential race in 2016, Clinton was tainted by it and here we are. Misogynists everywhere, left and right, are now celebrating.

For perspective, Catholicism is not the dominant religion here. The religious fundamentalists who are the dominant political force in many areas are actually even more conservative than the Catholic Church. Imagine Ireland in the sixties to the nth degree.

There's Ovarit.

I went on Twitter today, to find out what US feminist organisations have to say about these events. They are all angry, of course, and vow to fight for all the people who need abortion services but especially for those people who are rural or who are poor or who are people of color and so on.

Which is dispiriting, not because those groups wouldn't especially be affected, but because this law does not exempt anyone with a uterus and fertility, and also because the erasure of the name for the group which applies to all people needing abortions.

It's difficult to create a political movement when the focus is so much on divisions and almost not at all on what we all share, and also when so many organisations calling themselves feminist are actually humanist organisations now, so they divide their resources over a large number of issues, many of them affecting women and men equally.

Yet other social justice movements in the US left don't much care about intersectionality and don't much care about how women fare within the group they advocate for, and that seems to be just fine.

The US right, on the other hand, has no divisions in its policies towards women. So we have one side which is united and persistent and another side which is divided and bickering within itself and which also has created a language making political mobilisation almost impossibly difficult. I can't think of any word that we could now use to define the group we want to mobilise.

Then I realised that for some time now I haven't even been bothering to read the tweets from organisations like Planned Parenthood or Naral or Ms magazine, possibly because when I did read them they weren't really aimed at people like me. And I can't think of very many US feminists whose arguments appeal to me, probably because so many of them no longer view the mistreatment of women from the angle of being sex-based.

I am crying today. I don't cry very often.

Yesterday the US senate failed to pass the PUMP act for nursing mothers to expand the rights of breastfeeding mothers. While they do have some rights to pump at work, it was supposed to be extended to 'exempt' employees too. They are also dealing with a formula shortage.

So force women to have babies, then make it extremely difficult to feed them while you go back to work days after, still bleeding.

Fucking. Arseholes.

I live in the US. This is so profoundly depressing that I can't even express my current state of mind.

It's too complicated to explain the legal ramifications, but suffice it to say that there will be large areas where it it will be illegal not only to get an abortion but also to assist anyone else to obtain one.

I am afraid to even speak out about this on a US site

I joined mumsnet partially because there is no comparable anonymous site stateside but I also have fears about how even this place can be compromised.

The anti abortionists have already demonstrated a willingness and capability to use online tracking, for instance period tracking apps and Google searches and fake pregnancy crisis centers that dox pregnant women.

This is terrifying.

I feel so shocked that this is really real. In our lifetimes. Even if in a few years they can reverse this, the abortion providers won’t be able to just pick the services back up. They’ll have moved into other areas of medicine or have left the country. The next generation won’t be learning abortion skills at medical school or training as junior doctors to do abortions. They won’t be researching to improve the care that women want and that they need medically.

This is setting back abortion provision and women’s rights in that huge country by a generation, even in the best case scenario that it’s really quickly reversed. And will embolden those extremists to go for contraception access and maternity rights at work next, same sex marriage, all of it.