Roe Dies. America Divides – And It Ain’t All About Women

A House Divided, Photo: KAREN BLEIER/AFP

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“Women are just roadkill in this fight, it’s all about men.” (Quote from the upcoming documentary Fairplay by Jennifer Siebel Newsom.)

The end of Roe v Wade is the first big wave of the Conservative Supreme Court’s impact on America. It won’t be the last. The Trumped-up Court is now muscling up its macho-retro stance, and five robed judges have just robbed some 36 million American women of their right to an abortion. While it will drown women’s rights to bodily control, it also reveals the scarily undemocratic dance this divided nation is now locked in. After all, a majority of Americans support abortion. Yet what became a constitutional right a half-century ago has just been reversed – it is unlikely to be won back anytime soon. It’s a move that should worry at least as many men as women.

Almost all 38 OECD countries allow abortion. American exceptionalism is going down a dark, backward slide. Women are always the canary in the coal mine of countries’ evolving stance on human rights. This is just the beginning. A minority has the bit in its teeth. This weekend will see an uprising of reactions across the country.

Like climate change, adaptation and mitigation are the urgent agenda response. Here are four places to start.

1. Get the Tech on Tap

There’s a newish solution to an age-old problem. Abortion medication (which needs a new name) is a simple, affordable 2-pill solution sold across the world. In the US, Plan C helps get access and publishes a list of where to find pills in all 50 states. Stock up your medicine cabinet, give it to your kids and your kids’ friends. Help the next generation prepare for this brave new world. Technology may become a gal’s (and her guy’s – see below) best friend.

ACTION: Share information on where to find pills @plancpills across all 50 states. For medical and legal support, share links to mahotline.org and reprohelpline.org. To order pills ahead of time go to aidaccess.org.

2. Reframe Care as Healthcare

Eve Rodsky, the author of Fairplay, is pushing for unpaid care, including parental and elder care, to be presented as healthcare priorities. She points to the huge healthcare costs resulting from the stress of juggling caregiving with work – from mental health to chronic diseases. Women still bear the brunt of both childcare and elder care. Overturning Roe will add further health pressures and stressors with the addition of unwanted children and the criminalisation of what just yesterday was a right. The US is now almost the only country in the world without paid maternity leave (it stands here with Papua New Guinea), piling up the untenable pressures of work/ family conciliation on women. Rodsky says support for care should be seen as preventive medicine. Overturning Roe adds urgency to this repositioning. The White House Blueprint for addressing maternal health was announced an hour before the results of the Supreme Court’s 5 to 4 vote. Its ambitions to make the US “one of the best places in the world to have a baby” may not get heard above the protests.

ACTION: Join the longer haul political push at shoutyourabortion.com and plancpills.org/ambassadors.

3. Support Kansas

The Supreme Court vote makes abortion immediately illegal in 13 states with “trigger laws” that become automatically active. Another dozen or so states are expected to revisit pre-Roe bans or pass new ones. There are six states with only a single, now-doomed, abortion clinic. Kansas is the only state in the ‘abortion desert’ of the Midwest to still allow them and Rodsky is pointing her fundraising efforts their way. The 23 states which will ban abortion are also states without paid family leave legislation. Their issue becomes one not only of women’s bodies, but also of gender roles and labour force participation. This in not just a cultural and moral wedge right through the soul of America. It is also an economic one.

ACTION: DONATE to the future of access at pledge.to/access or support clinics at keepourclinics.org

4. Make Fathers Accountable

Most of the debate around abortion focuses on the cost to individual women – especially to poor women, who will be most hit. But all babies – even unwanted ones – have two parents. Men must be made accountable for their actions. If we are returning to an era of unfree sex, let’s make sure men pay for their pleasures – and their progeny. Not just financially, but also in time, care and emotional labor. Ecstatic anti-abortionists now have a responsibility to prove they are pro-balanced parenting, and not simply anti-women’s rights. Could fatherhood and responsible masculinity become a bi-partisan issue? One that unites across genders? Could the next generation of children – wanted and unwanted – unite their warring parents?

ACTION: Push for education for men and boys around gender roles, reproductive responsibilities and contraception. It works elsewhere. Don’t make abortion all about women. Get men involved at every age and every stage. Make them own their chromosomes.