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Watching Reproductive Justice Vanish
I am old enough to remember when, in 1973, Roe v Wade was ruled into law. I can also remember having a kitchen-table abortion, in 1956, after a workplace rape — in a time when both rape and abortion were too shameful — but only for the woman involved — ever to be mentioned. So it is beyond distressing to watch reproductive justice disappearing. This is a current look at two pieces of that disintegration.
A tiny bit of qualified good news: recently Theodore Chuang, U.S. District Judge for the District of Maryland ruled that during the covid-19 crisis requiring women to travel to clinics for medication abortion — a matter of taking a few pills — presented a “substantial obstacle” for these patients. This is good news for women, and for telehealth. In this upside down time, those of us who have fought for reproductive justice over the past decades of its steady decline tend to glom onto any tiny bit of good news.
The problem is, such an overwhelming amount of bad news remains that it’s hard to feel optimistic for more than five minutes. The bad news includes an endless list of anti-abortion rulings by lower courts that have been filled with conservative judges at an astonishing speed over the past three and a half years, a constant onslaught of state restrictions making abortion access harder and harder especially for the poor or powerless, and even the…
