My Body, The Supreme Court’s Choice
On Friday, June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade (1973) ruling, no longer authorizing the constitutional right to abortion. I woke up that morning burdened with an overwhelming amount of decision-related discourse; text messages from friends checking in; what appeared to be a never-ending Twitter timeline full of recaps, memes, and strangers sharing their traumatic stories; and an Instagram timeline with acquaintances offering themselves as safe spaces to speak with. I narrowly escaped the inevitable nudges, avoiding any urges to acknowledge my feelings. I refused to believe what was happening around me, and carried on as I would any other day, just this time without a constitutional right to bodily autonomy. That being said, as a white cis-gendered woman, I recognize and acknowledge my privilege and the, albeit limited, bodily autonomy I do have.
The 1973 ruling, contrary to popular belief, stems from a thread of landmark rulings concerned with bodily autonomy (Curry, 2010). Regarding vaccination statutes in the early 20th century, cases such as Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) and Zucht v. King (1922) debated individual vaccination choices and community-wide mandates. Concerns about ‘race suicide’ and protecting women’s reproductive systems from labor-intensive work during the rise of industrialization were reinforced in Muller v. Oregon (1908). Furthermore, eugenicist practices and broader anxieties about the strength and future of the nation were expressed in Buck v. Bell (1927), in which individuals who were considered ‘feeble-minded’ were unknowingly subject to institutional sterilization; however, this was later overturned in 1942 by Skinner v. Oklahoma, enforcing the right to reproduction (Curry, 2010).
As Curry (2010) indicates, Skinner set the precedent for Court decisions concerning the right to personal privacy, which later had a great impact on the initial Roe v. Wade (1973) ruling, where the Supreme Court upheld that the “right of privacy…found in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty…is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy” (J.D., 1974, as cited in Linton, 1989, p. 227). Nearly five decades later, though, the constitutional right to abortion was revoked in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), under the presumption that abortion is not “an essential component of ‘ordered liberty’” (p. 2). According to Daum (2022), the Dobbs v. Jackson decision is a Foucauldian biopolitical exercise, further institutionalizing white supremacy. People of color are those most subject to impacts of abortion bans, as “structural inequities and racism [will] guarantee that poor and pregnant people of color will be forced to resort to more dangerous and desperate measures” (Daum, 2022, p. 1) for pregnancy terminations, while those not subject to the same systematic inequities will continue to be able to safely access abortions.
Collins (2009) illustrates the consequences of abortion access disparities, indicating that prior to Roe v. Wade (1973), those who died from illegal abortions were predominantly Black women. More specifically, in the years leading up to the landmark ruling, Black and Puerto Rican women encompassed 80 percent of those who died from illegal abortions (Davis, 1981, as cited in Collins, 2009). Now, more than ever, reproductive rights issues “require careful attention to how nation-state politics affect US Black women” (Collins, 2009, p. 137). That being said, these rights are issued upon justifications of “essential components of ‘ordered liberty’” (Dobbs v. Jackson, 2022, p. 2), which are the same justifications that issued other constitutional human rights, such as contraception, marriage equality, and intimacy, evidently targeting additional minority groups (Gostin & Reingold, 2022). This begs the question, are these previously deemed constitutional rights, among others nonetheless, likely to fall victim to conservative presumptions who dictate what is and is not an “essential component of ‘ordered liberty’” (Dobbs v. Jackson, 2022, p. 2)? I, for one, am not particularly hopeful that we will see otherwise…
References:
Collins, P.H. (2009). Black Feminist Thought. Routledge.
Curry, L. (2010). Beyond "Choice": Roe v. Wade as U. S. Constitutional History. Journal of Women’s History, 22(2), 166-170. https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.0.0155
Daum, C.W. (2022). The Dobbs’ Majority’s Biopolitics and the Advancement of Institutionalized White Supremacy. New Political Science. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2022.2119334
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 19-1392 (2022). https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf
Gostin, L.O., & Reingold, R.B. (2022). Ending the constitutional right to abortion in the United States: New ruling threatens rights to health, bodily integrity, and equality. BMJ, 378(1897). http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.o1897
Linton, P. (1989). Roe v. wade and the history of abortion regulation. American Journal of Law & Medicine, 15(2&3), 227-232.