Row v Wade

The supreme court just overturned Roe v Wade. News came on our mobile phones, after I had facilitated a socratic dialogue near Bath, breaking our momentum – it was indeed dramatic news. After 50 years. The court’s move will allow more than half of states to ban abortion, with an immediate impact on tens of millions of Americans. It is of course the legacy of Trump, and his appointments to the Supreme Court of ‘pro life’ judges.

It has repercussions:

Conservative justice Clarence Thomas said protections for gay rights, same-sex marriage and contraception should also be reconsidered.

A spate of brilliantly caricatured cartoons have appeared, juxtaposing the recent right to guns with the lack of right of women over their bodies.

Affirming to read the backstory to Roe v Wade.

In 1969, Norma McCorvey, a Texas woman in her early 20s, sought to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. McCorvey, who had grown up in difficult, impoverished circumstances, previously had given birth twice and given up both children for adoption. At the time of McCorvey’s pregnancy in 1969 abortion was legal in Texas—but only for the purpose of saving a woman’s life.

While American women with the financial means could obtain abortions by traveling to other countries where the procedure was safe and legal, or pay a large fee to a U.S. doctor willing to secretly perform an abortion, those options were out of reach to McCorvey and many other women.

As a result, some women resorted to illegal, dangerous, “back-alley” abortions or self-induced abortions. In the 1950s and 1960s, the estimated number of illegal abortions in the United States ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

After trying unsuccessfully to get an illegal abortion, McCorvey was referred to Texas attorneys Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington, who were interested in challenging anti-abortion laws.

In court documents, McCorvey became known as “Jane Roe.”. Henry Wade was the the district attorney of Dallas County, where McCorvey lived.

The case migrated out of the Texas court to the Supreme Count and on Jan 22, 1973, the Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, struck down the Texas law banning abortion, effectively legalizing the procedure nationwide.