Overturning Roe v. Wade is a staging post to restrictions on other matters
It has taken anti-abortion campaigners a concerted five-decade campaign to get here: the Supreme Court’s provisional decision to overturn Roe v Wade. More than half of America’s women can expect to live in states where abortion is banned or greatly restricted if, as anticipated, next month’s ruling is largely unchanged. Yet that will not mark the climactic triumph of the anti-abortion lobby. In their eyes, it is merely a staging post to further restrictions on other matters too, affecting more people – including outside the U.S.
First, they will not be satisfied with pre-Roe laws or even the trigger laws waiting for Roe v Wade to fall. There will be a new drive to remove exemptions from bans, such as for rape and incest. While many state laws have so far targeted providers, we can expect increasing attempts to criminalize women who have abortions – or are suspected of having done so. Louisiana already has a trigger law in place to ban abortion after six weeks; on Wednesday, a House committee voted for a bill that would make abortion a homicide and allow women to be charged for obtaining one.
Strikingly, the bill would also change the state’s legal definition of a person from a fertilized egg implanted in the womb to simply a fertilized egg. That points to a second issue: activists are already beginning to target forms of birth control, such as emergency contraception and some intrauterine devices that can stop fertilized eggs from being implanted, by wrongly framing them as abortifacients. Third, the draft opinion drives a bulldozer through the foundations of other rights similarly rooted in privacy protections, such as LGBTQ+ rights; even if it adds that abortion is unique because it concerns life or potential life, those all become more vulnerable.