The Limits of Privilege: The new abortion regime is going to affect everyone.

[Novara]

In 2015, the Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “We will never see a day when women of means are not able to get a safe abortion in this country.” If you have paid attention to mainstream progressive politics in recent years, you have likely heard some version of this message: that privileged women — middle- and upper-class women, cis women, white women — are not going to experience much of a change to their circumstances when Roe v. Wade goes. In September 2021, on the day Texas’s sweeping anti-abortion law, SB8, went into effect, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts asserted that “when abortion is illegal, rich women still get abortions. Women with resources still get abortions.” It has become common wisdom, so much so that a December article on Bloomberg Law confidently predicted that “restrictive abortion laws will have little effect on professional women or those in their orbit.”

There are a lot of very good reasons to point out the structural inequities that indeed make restrictions on reproductive-health care racist and particularly punishing for the poor. Abortion bans, as Warren says, hurt “the most vulnerable among us,” a statement that is rooted in extremely correct racial and class analysis. It perfectly sums up the circumstances of the past 40 years, when the Hyde Amendment and state restrictions made abortion all but inaccessible to many poor, Black, brown, immigrant, and Indigenous communities while middle-class white people could feel assured about the umbrella protection of Roe.

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And however well intentioned or important it is to acknowledge the decades of disproportionate and destructive damage abortion restrictions under Roe have done to poor families of color, the recent mainstream emphasis on the notion that some Americans will come out of the end of Roe unscathed is a strategic mistake.

If these past years with COVID have taught us anything, it’s that if you tell middle-class white people that they will be fine, they will not give a rat’s ass about anyone else. And so this message, intended to engender empathy and provoke action and commitment, may instead have been an anesthetizing one. It may have permitted middle-class white people, with their significant political clout, to sleepwalk comfortably — as they have through all of Roe’s existence — into the waiting jaws of illegality.

More: https://www.thecut.com/2022/05/roe-v-wade-limits-of-privilege.html