We Will Only Miss Roe When It Is Gone

It was very disorienting, on stepping off the plane after an 18-hour flight to Singapore, to be assaulted by the news that the Supreme Court is on the verge of overturning Roe v. Wade. It was a scene from a sci-fi novel. Somehow the plane had not only deposited me on the other side of the globe, but in an alternative reality. Something like the “multiverse” described in the most recent Spider-Man movie.

            The gratuitous pain that will flow from these events is bizarre to contemplate. Media coverage and mainstream political commentary will focus on the reductive issues of abortion and choice. We will hear much about the horrors of back-alley procedures and the crushing economic consequences of unwanted pregnancy. While all of those concerns are real, they are just the tip of a large and grotesquely toxic iceberg. Roe has been protecting us from some of the most malignant dimensions of our own politics for many decades. We have taken the decency and social equity produced by Roe for granted, and are going to REALLY miss it once it is gone.

            Absent a consensus that a woman has full rights over her own body, the full power of the government will be available to be harnessed by fanatics and bigots of all stripes and magnitudes. If the rights of a fetus can trump those of the woman who carries it, all women become subject to massively expanded surveillance powers of the state, and will be susceptible to controls to which no fully autonomous citizen would be compelled to assent.

The government will have an interest in knowing whenever a women is late for her period, so as to know whether or not she is carrying a “person” in need of “protection.” Each woman’s movements and habits will thus be open to expanded scrutiny to that end. Any time a woman might be pregnant it will be logical to restrict her work and travel. She could not do any job that might increase the risk of a miscarriage, and would have to be prevented from traveling to a place where abortion is legal.

Anyone who scoffs at such worries sounds a lot like those Germans who laughed off the danger to Jews in Germany in 1933, when Hitler first became Chancellor. If you create an opportunity for fanatics to use state power they seize it, and they use it without any regard for what the majority might consider “reasonable” or “decent.”  Most Americans do not vote on the issue of reproductive freedom because it is much like food: as long as you have it in good supply, you pay little attention to where it comes from. It is only when such a basic asset begins to run out that it becomes an urgent concern. Those voters who did concern themselves intensely with reproductive freedom before now were mainly concerned that everyone else had too much of it. As those voters' wishes come true, everyone else is going to feel the noose drawing tighter.

If Roe v. Wade is overturned, it will be the moral equivalent of reinstating the Dred Scott decision or nullifying Brown v. Board of Education. Instantly, millions of Americans will be turned into second-class citizens. The practical impact of that state of affairs on the lives of millions of women will be slow to build, but inexorable. The only redress will be to amend the Constitution by way of restoring the autonomy and dignity of all Americans. In the current climate of polarization it is difficult to imagine such a remedy meeting with success. But as the fanatics and bigots do their work, and as the peace, security, and decency that Roe afforded us as a society melts away, the momentum to amend the Constitution will build. The task will be long and the effort strenuous, but the work begins now.