Abortion rights in danger

The Hump Day Hot Topic

Earlier today, the United States Supreme Court declined to consider a Texas law that restricts all abortions after six weeks. The Court may have declined, in part, because it will soon review a Mississippi law that will place abortion rights front and center on the Court's docket—and in the annals of American history. 

Protesters deep in the heart of Texas

In the decade since I joined Facebook, I have penned about a half-dozen or so posts about the perennially hot topic of abortion. I have analyzed this issue from political, social, and religious vantage points and noticed that when I so engage, that I receive few to no responses in the public square.

I note this not out of some form of narcissism, but to state from the outset of today's essay that the very fact that I have stirred up thousands of comments on everything from the profound, to the profane, to the entertainingly inane—but not on abortion—shows that the subject is deemed extremely private by social media friends and followers who otherwise feel free to engage.

Since 1973, when Roe vs. Wade made abortions legal in America, women have had the inherent privacy to choose whether to abort after consulting with their doctors. Throughout my childhood in the 1980's, I watched in real time as the Republican Party, then under the leadership of President Ronald Reagan, adopted the cause of what has become known as the "Pro-Life" movement. I remember thinking back then that each time that I saw religious figures equating abortion to "thou shalt not kill" sinful behavior, that said figures, like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, didn't look like I looked and more crucially, aligned themselves with former segregationists who had migrated to the Republican Party after Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voter Rights Act into law in 1965.

And yet, those religious figures, curiously, would occasionally raise the issue of Black babies being aborted as part of their charges to end abortion rights. Having become fully aware of America's tortured history regarding race from a public policy standpoint as early as 9th grade, I saw through the web of lies on this issue and was fully cognizant that something deeper than concern for the unborn just had to be at play.

The same still holds true today as most conservatives claiming to be "pro-life" are among the same ones now showing up en masse and unmasked at School Board meetings to push for their "choice" to send their kids to school—maskless. The irony is rich in that these ones who swear that they care for the lives of the unborn, display little to no concern for the living who have caught Covid-19 at school; or, who are suffering and in an increasing number of cases, dying from Covid-19. Many of these self-styled conservatives are among the most ardent death penalty proponents and warmongers who are mad that President Biden hasn't left a garrison to fight the Taliban and ISIS-K in Afghanistan—positions that further seal their rank hypocrisies on matters of life or death. 

Still, having watched the politics of abortion since the 1980s, I have observed from afar as what started off as an idea—removing legal protections for abortions on demand—is on the verge of being ratified for most of America. During this span, I have watched while Republican Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump all genuflected at the altar of the so-called "Moral Majority" in hopes of gaining support of evangelical voters (read-white), the very ones who considered fealty to ending abortion as THE central issue within their politics. 

Back in 2016, many abortion rights supporters warned that the next president would likely pick three United States Supreme Court Justices and by so doing, tilt the balance of the Court to the right or to the left for at least a generation. This reasoning proved prescient as what will be the lasting legacy of Donald Trump's one term is his nominating and confirming of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, three Federalist Society veterans who were far too intelligent and savvy to say outright that they would end abortion as Trump promised, but whose ideological leanings throughout their careers lead many veteran court watchers to conclude that the inevitability of them joining Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Clarence Thomas, and Justice Samuel Alito in a majority decision to reverse Roe all but a formality. 

While I have commented on abortion time and again in my public advocacy, I am still left to wonder by what right do political, judicial, and even religious entities have to regulate such a private decision between a woman/girl and their doctors? I do not know for sure, but what I do know is that many of my friends who have made this choice in their pasts, struggle with it to varying degrees years afterward because of the stigma that's attached from scare tactics and vitriolic language emanating from abortion opponents across America. 

I remember my senior year at Morehouse College when one of my close friends told me that she was pregnant and that the child's father was against her having an abortion and refused to pay for the procedure—or show up in support. She told me that she was scared and asked me if I would go with her to the Atlanta area clinic, so I did.

Not knowing what to expect, I was thrown off at first when we arrived at the clinic and while the women working were extremely attentive to my friend, I caught what I thought were sideways glares from the receptionist and a nurse who I assumed were assuming that I was the reason that my friend was about to have an abortion. Looking back, I think that such was more my paranoia than any real animus by the professionals because at 21-years old, I was trying to be strong for my friend, but I was scared almost witless because I was clueless as to what would happen next. 

What happened was that after I held my friend's hand with my left hand and wiped her tears away and stroked her face with my right while the short procedure was completed, I remember thinking to myself as she recovered that men, in particular, and women, too, for that matter, had no right to pillory, criticize, demean, discredit, or vilify any woman/girl who had made the harrowing decision to abort. At all!

All eyes on the U.S. Supreme Court this fall

I also realized that what was anecdotally clear from many a dorm and classroom discussion was that most of my male friends did not have a level of attachment to their own unborn children, a fact that many years later, leads some women who chose to abort in their younger years to hesitate trusting even their closest male friends and significant others from fear that they will be abandoned. That, and the deep insecurity some women experience from their anxiety from fearing that they may be considered unworthy by the very hypocritical men who have caused unwanted pregnancies—or the hypocritical women who had endured abortions but in their “got good religion” proselytizing, would prefer to eliminate such personal choices for other women. 

Digressing, since leaving law school in the late 1990's, I have seen enough to know that one can never fully predict what the Supreme Court will do on any matter;  while there is enough of a record to know for sure that Justices Thomas and Alito will assuredly vote to reverse Roe, conservative Chief Justice Roberts, and Trump appointees Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, have shown occasional penchants over their terms to surprise by bucking right orthodoxy, so we shall see. 

But if Roe is ultimately overturned, which I am predicting this day, then what America will likely find is that Blue states will continue to permit abortions, while Red states will rush to enact the most restrictive abortion laws that they can legislate consistent with the new Supreme Court dicta. A fact which, ostensibly, reminds that in many ways, America remains stuck in its faux puritanical past. A past that was anything but pure from the outset, but one in which purity does not matter so long as what I've long sensed is the true aim of abortion opponents—preventing the further "Browning of America" and rendering of whites as a racial minority. 

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