Let Roe Go: Winning Abortion Rights
Jim Kavanagh
With Roe v. Wade overturned, and multiple states rushing to institute draconian abortion bans, the abortion-rights movement faces the task of winning—anew, but effectively for the first time—a right many of us mistakenly thought was secured. To do that requires, I think, recognizing and abandoning the diversionary legal-constitutional and partisan-political paths in which confidence was misplaced, and sharpening the tools needed for a strong and irreversible victory in the wider political sense.
Judge Not
Of course,
the abortion-rights battle must be waged on all fronts. But legal and legislative
victories will only be won securely as a result of winning broad and
deep political support—persuading a majority of people of the justice and
necessity of the cause. That is the kind of political work that created the
conditions for Roe v. Wade—independent, risky personal and collective political
action, including civil disobedience, that highlighted the plight and right of
pregnant women, and the hypocrisy and cruelty of criminalizing abortion.
Though it
was, at the time, a punctual victory that resulted from such work, Roe
also turned out to be Pyrrhic. Roe has arguably weakened the abortion-rights
movement, which centered itself on defending the decision, searching for
Supreme Court nominees who would support it, and engaging in partisan battles
about it—at the expense of building wider and deeper popular support for the
substantive right throughout the country.
Roe pre-empted an offensive strategy of growing a mass political movement for abortion rights, and channeled it into defensive, system-reaffirming, judicial and partisan “politics.” The abortion rights movement complacently placed its trust in an alliance with sympathetic magistrates and Democratic politicians and forewent the task of non-partisan persuasion—continually making its case and strengthening its support among masses of people whose support cannot be taken for granted or written off. While “pro-choice” liberals were playing with their RBG dolls, 15-year-old girls (and their parents) throughout the country were being talked to, and shown pictures of dead fetuses, by conservative pastors. Who’s approach was more effective?
