Abortion rights supporters rallied across the United States on Saturday for a second day of protests against the Supreme Court’s decision to smash what many thought was a given.
By revoking its emblematic decision “Roe v. Wade”, which since 1973 guaranteed the right of American women to have an abortion, the high court leaves the choice to the States to prohibit or not the IVG in a deeply divided country.
Thousands of people gathered outside the Supreme Court in Washington on Saturday, surrounded by barriers and placed under police protection.
“What happened yesterday is indescribable and disgusting,” exclaimed Mia Stagner, a 19-year-old political science student. “No woman should be forced to become a mother.”
Around her, defenders of the right to abortion chanted “separation of Church and State”, or even “my body, my choice”.
But if the decision horrified progressive activists, it delighted those who, especially on the religious right, had been fighting for its cancellation for decades. A few dozen anti-abortion people also came to court on Saturday.
“I believe in the sanctity and dignity of human life,” Savannah Craven, an anti-abortion activist from the “Live action group,” told Agence France-Presse (AFP). “Life begins in the womb, life begins at conception”.
Several hundred abortion rights activists also gathered in Los Angeles and protests were planned in other cities, notably in the states which took advantage of the Court’s judgment to immediately ban abortions on their ground.
While clinics in Missouri, South Dakota or Georgia closed their doors one after the other, Democratic states, such as California or New York, have pledged to defend access to abortions on their soil.
President Joe Biden said Saturday before flying to Europe to know “how painful and devastating this decision is for many Americans”.
“A Scary Moment”
On Friday, he called on Americans to defend the right to abortion during the midterm elections in November.
Defenders of the right to abortion also fear that the Supreme Court, with a clear conservative majority, will reverse other rights such as marriage for all or contraception.
“They attacked women. They are going to attack the LGBT community and contraception,” Caroline Keller, a protester she met outside the Supreme Court, told AFP.
This prospect “worries us” and “we are going to have nightmarish situations”, recognized the spokesperson for the White House, Karine Jean-Pierre, on board Air Force One. “It’s a scary moment.”
On Friday, two demonstrations were marked by violence. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a pickup truck rammed into a group of protesters, injuring a woman in the foot, according to local media.
And in Arizona, police have admitted using tear gas to disperse protesters who “repeatedly banged on the windows of the state Senate”.
In Los Angeles, a demonstration was dispersed in a muscular way by police officers equipped with batons.
Poor and minorities penalized
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research center that campaigns for access to contraception and abortion in the world, half of the States should ban abortions in the more or less short term.
Within hours Friday, at least eight states immediately made all abortions illegal.
Seven others have planned to do the same in the coming weeks, but in fact, clinics there have already stopped performing abortions, as in Texas, the largest US state, where women wishing to have an abortion will now have to have abortions. hundreds of miles to get to the nearest clinic in New Mexico.
In one part of the country, women wishing to have an abortion will be forced to continue their pregnancy, to manage clandestinely, in particular by obtaining abortion pills on the Internet, or to travel to other States where abortions will remain legal.
Anticipating an influx, these mostly Democratic states took steps to make abortions easier to access on their soil, and clinics began to shift their staffing and equipment resources.
But traveling is expensive and the Supreme Court ruling will further penalize poor or single-parent women, who are overrepresented in black and Hispanic minorities, abortion rights advocates point out.
The organization Parenthood planned (Family planning), which campaigns for the right to abortion, said in a statement to AFP on Saturday that it had seen the number of donations it normally receives in a day multiply by 40. “C t’s just the beginning and we won’t give up,” said Kelley Robinson, vice-president of this association.