Briley RakowOn June 24 of this year, the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, dismantling federal legal protection for women seeking abortions. It was a Friday, and I was working at a summer camp without access to my phone or the news. As campers were leaving on Saturday morning, I received my phone only to immediately be bombarded with headlines.
Post after post, article after article, I stared in disbelief at what this meant. Despite having heard for years about the conservative “pro-life” movement, I never truly believed that the Supreme Court would vote to take away women’s rights in 2022.
Years of safe access to abortion for victims of rape and incest, women with life-threatening pregnancy complications and those who do not have the emotional or financial capability of raising a child were gone, just like that.
Roe v. Wade was passed in 1973, a time when gay marriage was illegal and no-fault divorce was only just beginning to be passed into law by individual states. The AIDS epidemic had not yet peaked, and Watergate was a current event.
Even then, access to safe abortions was a right long overdue. Women fought for decades to finally have rights to their own bodies and futures the way men have for millennia. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, they established themselves against everything those women stood for.
Mississippi is among the many states that have decades-old abortion bans still in place, meaning our state could soon return to the same enforcement of abortions from 50 years ago.
Gov. Tate Reeves has alluded to further repealing women’s reproductive rights through actions such as prohibiting access to contraceptives and Plan B. The idea that women would once again be forced into unwanted pregnancy through the lack of access to contraception is barbaric and wrong. It seems like Mississippi has learned nothing from the countless studies showing that teaching and expecting abstinence is completely ineffective.
Without proper sex education and access to reproductive health care, women are once again less than citizens, without the rights and information to take proper care of their own bodies.
Among the dissenting were Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayer and Elena Kagan. They said that the court’s opinion means “a state can force (a woman) to bring a pregnancy to term even at the steepest personal and familial costs.” Medical situations like ectopic pregnancies, where the embryo develops outside the uterus, which occur in 1 out of every 50 pregnancies, may not be considered under new abortion legislation. While Mississippi currently has exceptions to abortion regulation for the life of the mother, many in the state legislature are fighting for total regulation, meaning nearly every ectopic pregnancy would end in fatality.
At what point do the Republicans in office take into account the safety of women? I struggle to understand what is so “pro-life” about allowing a woman to die for the sake of an unborn fetus, and further what the right believes will happen when there is suddenly an influx of babies thrown into the already broken foster care system.
Being anti-abortion is not pro-life. It is pro-power. Establishing the inferiority of women through legislature has always been on the agenda of many men in government, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade was just one more step backwards for American equality. We should be truly embarrassed as a nation to have allowed such an inequitable law to be in place once again.
America is supposed to stand for freedom, but how long can we continue to claim this when we so blatantly disregard the rights and liberties of women within our so-called great nation? Until Roe v. Wade once again stands, and reproductive rights are protected for all women in all circumstances, American liberty will be nothing more than a cruel oxymoron.
