“For half of American women, abortion will be almost or completely banned”, explains Friday June 24 on franceinfo Nicole Bacharan, political scientist and historian, specialist in the United States. The Supreme Court gave the freedom to the 50 American states to prohibit voluntary termination of pregnancy (abortion) on their soil by burying the Roe vs. Wade of 1973, which until then guaranteed the right to abortion.
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franceinfo: How do you explain this “backtracking”?
Nicole Bacharan: It is an ultra-conservative offensive that has been in the making for 50 years. Ever since abortion was legalized in the United States, you have churches and conservative groups working to advocate, find lawyers to argue, and so on.
“But the shift really happened with the presidency of Donald Trump, whose religious concerns are known to be self-serving or extremely superficial.”
Nicole Bacharan, historianat franceinfo
But he had the opportunity to appoint three justices to the Supreme Court, three ultra-conservative justices who made a difference today. And Donald Trump, with his judges, is today fulfilling the contract he had made with his voters: prohibiting abortion in the United States, this will be the case in the coming weeks in about half of the American states. .
What can Joe Biden do to try to reverse this decision. Is there a way to prevent this stop from being applied?
Right now, no, really not. The Supreme Court is the supreme law of the land. So the president said “what we could do is pass a federal law passed in Congress in Washington which protects the right to abortion”, a federal law which would therefore apply in all states. The Supreme Court, in its judgment today, in all hypocrisy if you want my opinion, does not say “we prohibit abortion” but “we no longer protect it”. So it is up to the States to make their choice and vote their law. About half of those 50 states will ban it. Thus, one could imagine that a federal law instituting the right to abortion for all American women could override this Supreme Court judgment. But that would mean a very strong majority in Congress, especially in the Senate, with at least 60 senators. And not only does Joe Biden not have this majority today, but it seems quite unlikely that he will have it by November, when we will have legislative elections again. The reality is that for half of American women, abortion will be virtually or completely banned, and women will continue to have abortions in situations where they feel they have no choice. It’s as old as the history of the world and as the history of women what is going to happen.
What are these women going to do now if the state in which they reside prohibits abortion?
The wealthiest, those who can take leave, those who have a little financial means, those who have family to help them, will travel. They will travel thousands of miles trying to get an appointment at a clinic in a liberal state. Clinics which, in more liberal states, are going to be absolutely overloaded. And then the most modest women, those who already have several children, who cannot take a day off, these will have recourse to “methods” which will endanger their life and their health. Some will give birth to children that they cannot support.
“In fact, it’s something absolutely dramatic because the legislator or the Supreme Court justice imagines that he is going to prevent abortions from taking place, no, he is just going to prevent abortions from taking place in proper sanitary conditions.
Nicole Bacharan, historianat franceinfo
Does American society approve of this decision rendered today by the Supreme Court, in your opinion?
No. There are only 28% of Americans who wanted us to reverse this famous Roe vs. Wade judgment which protected the right to abortion. 28%, that did not mean that it should be banned. Which is not the same thing. What has really evolved is the more radical part of the Evangelicals, the ultra-conservative Catholics and part of the Republican Party. Republican presidents like Nixon, who was president when abortion was legalized, Reagan, George Bush, Eisenhower, none were on this radical religious line. This radical character is rather recent and does not correspond to the general evolution of society.