It took about ten minutes to walk from Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen to the small single-story building five blocks away on Main Street that houses one of the last practicing clinics voluntary terminations of pregnancy in Texas. On the square, the faithful distributed anti-abortion leaflets denouncing its activities.
A year and a half after the cancellation of Roe v. Wade, the landscape has changed. The Whole Women’s Health clinic gave way (after a nominee acquired it) to an anti-choice group, the McAllen Pregnancy Center. Long located three doors away, he has symbolically taken over the building. A bit like a belligerent power would come to occupy a place of power after having fought hard and won a portion of territory. It is no coincidence that we speak of “culture wars”.
Indeed, if immigration has become the battle horse of the Republican camp, the right to choice in reproductive health is now that of the Democrats: it is a real political trench war which is taking shape… and from which American society will never emerge. not winning.
This divide is the culmination of fissures traced by several decades of attacks from the anti-choice movement which, through support for radical legislation and legal challenges, ended up winning its case (it is worth reviewing the documentary Reversing Roe on Netflix to understand the process). The political mobilization of the law paid off and a handful of judges of the Supreme Court of the United States ended up paving a deep furrow in the law and in society, from which they no longer seem to be able to extract themselves.
This was not, however, their constitutional destiny: Alexander Hamilton, among the founding fathers, portrayed them as “the least dangerous of all branches”, which the political scientist Robert A. Dahl confirmed in 1957 by describing an institution always in tow social developments. But the tide has turned and the high court finds itself at the heart of the political fray, at the risk of becoming, to use the words of David A. Kaplan, “the most dangerous of the branches”.
Because the judges had a good time, in the judgment Dobbs, to say that it was not up to them, as an institution, to define a national policy to justify referring the question of abortion to the States. The fact remains that by agreeing to take up two new causes, they once again have in their hands the power to send certain sections of society back to the 1950s.
On March 26, they will begin hearing arguments regarding access to mifepristone: the case was brought to court by the group Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine challenging the possibility, approved by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), of prescribing online and send by mail this pill used for medical termination of pregnancy. The strategy used was the same as to invalidate Roe v. Wade : unable to ban this use, the group tried again on more specific aspects, until being heard in the Supreme Court.
In the background, this strategy, which is based on the complications (and in doing so, the potential danger) linked to the use of a drug and which implicitly contests the scientific evaluation of the FDA, can go far beyond this sole objective. : the risk is that of the multiplication of ideological recourses against other forms of medication, ranging from contraception to vaccines.
Furthermore, in April, this same Supreme Court will have to hear the arguments on the obligation imposed by the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act (EMTALA) on hospitals (in particular those financing in connection with Medicare) to provide an interruption of pregnancy in emergency cases. Two cases are pending: one from Texas (where the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that EMTALA cannot force doctors to terminate a pregnancy, even in an emergency) and the other, from Idaho (where a district court held the opposite).
These two cases have in common that they pit the federal government against red states in the legal field. A dynamic that we therefore find as much in reproductive health as in the field of immigration. Against the backdrop of the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision that frozen embryos would be people and the possibility of another blow to the reproductive health edifice.
It is therefore no coincidence that, while the Democratic government struggles to make itself heard in the field of border management – and even regularly loses its feathers –, reproductive health has become the hobby horse of a Joe Biden who has long only paid lip service to abortion. It should also be noted that while the word appears explicitly in the written version of his State of the Union speech (available on the White House website), the American president did not say it in front of the Congress.
But the struggle is real for those voters who doubt their commitment to Biden, for those who are starting to lean toward the Republicans, for those who have not yet decided what they will do next November 5. This is why, undoubtedly for the first time in history, Vice-President Harris went to visit, as part of her tour of the pivotal states on the theme “ Fight for Reproductive Freedoms », a reproductive health clinic practicing voluntary terminations of pregnancies in Minnesota.
Because this State adopted quickly, after the ruling Dobbs, a law protecting the right to reproductive freedom — including abortion, contraception, and fertility services. Minnesota has become a sanctuary state, since the two neighboring Dakotas have gone the opposite way by banning abortion.
If the Democrats have stopped tiptoeing on this subject, it is because the majority (58% of Americans and 61% of women under 50) are in favor of freedom of choice (and must -we remind here that being pro-choice is not necessarily being pro-abortion, whereas being anti-choice is above all being anti-abortion). It is also a mobilizing issue.
It is above all a theme which highlights the great fractures in society. Where inequalities in access disproportionately affect economically fragile and socially vulnerable communities. Where geography is key to defining access to public services and draws a fault line between two Americas — one white, the other not; one wealthy, the other not; one blue, the other red… A divide with Dantesque prospects which does not seem to want to resolve itself.