Scott Lemieux: Getting Real About the Post-'Roe' World

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://prospect.org/justice/getting-real-about-the-post-roe-world/

The Supreme Court has overruled Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The ending of the 49-year period in which a woman had a federally protected right to terminate a pregnancy before fetal viability was inevitable as soon as Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Court. But while denial about the outcome is now functionally impossible, complacency about what overruling Roe means remains a potentially dangerous problem. Fighting the coming onslaught of the coercive policing of women’s bodies requires being clear-eyed about what will happen when Roe is overruled, some of which is indeed already happening.

Complacency about what a post-Roe world will look like has long been something of a cottage industry among pundits and commenters, predominantly from affluent men in blue-state urban areas who are least likely to be directly affected by the abrogation of reproductive rights. This tendency has not vanished—the comedian Bill Maher recently asserted that “we’re not going back to 1973” when Roe is overruled, earning an approving shout-out from Fox News. Perhaps one should only expect so much political insight from a comedian, but Yale Law’s Akhil Reed Amar sounded a similar note in The Wall Street Journal, providing hollow reassurances that overruling Roe won’t really be that bad. This kind of complacency from nominally pro-choice elites has deeper roots in American political culture.

One striking example of this comes from the 2014 midterms, a crucial step in the overruling of Roe, because Republicans were able to take the Senate that year. When Justice Antonin Scalia unexpectedly died in February 2016, Republicans held the seat open until after the presidential election, which was ultimately won by Donald J. Trump. Looking back, the 2014 midterms, derided as meaningless at the time, were just as consequential as any in recent memory.

One candidate who stressed that one potential consequence of the election was that Roe could be overruled if the GOP prevailed was Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, who was in a tough re-election fight with Republican candidate Cory Gardner. Udall’s forceful advocacy on the issue was prescient, but for his pains he was derisively labeled “Mark Uterus,” not only by Republicans but by multiple ostensibly neutral reporters. Gardner won, and voted to confirm all three of the justices nominated by Trump who are part of the anti-Roe majority.

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