For this series, The duty takes you behind the scenes of major reports by its journalists in 2022. In a country on edge, Stéphanie Marin reported on the heartbreaks post-Roe v. wade.
The white-columned neoclassical building of the United States Supreme Court was completely surrounded by barricades at the end of June. Unusual scene, he seemed to have draped himself in this iron protection for fear of violence and outbursts while a judgment was expected on a subject of the most explosive among our neighbors to the South: the right to abortion.
For days, as the end of the judicial session approached, citizens and journalists all over the world had been stamping their feet with impatience. The Court had not revealed the date of D-Day.
On the morning of June 24, I frantically refreshed the Court’s Web page every 30 seconds. The judgment was finally made public at 10:10 a.m. The constitutional protection offered for almost 50 years to millions of American women by the decree Roe v. wade had just been deleted.
The time to write a first text – at most 20 minutes – and to finish filling my backpack (without knowing for how many days), I rushed to the airport trying to catch the flight from 1 p.m. My payment for the ticket was blocked before I got there. Shady, I’m told, to book a flight just an hour before takeoff. I broke through security in a sweat.
At 4 p.m., I was in front of the Supreme Court in Washington. First Street was crowded with people chanting relentlessly to denounce the judgment. Police everywhere, including riot squads.
My boss was concerned for my safety: the memory of the assault on the Capitol was still fresh. But years of covering protests teach you never to turn your back on the streets and to keep an eye out for suspicious crowd movements.
The next morning, a request from my superiors: can I go to West Virginia? The idea was to measure the effect of the judgment outside of Washington, away from the politicians and officials who call it home in order to provide a more complete picture of the reactions.
Obviously ! The hardest part was finding a rental car at the last minute. The task took hours. Finally arrived at destination on a Saturday evening, I note with surprise that downtown Charleston is completely deserted. With a deadline the next day, it is more than urgent to feel the pulse of the residents. But what to do to talk to them, when everything is closed?
Meet them in the city parks, I think to myself. Bad luck, it’s raining heavily this Sunday morning and the streets are still empty.
No matter, I’ll go to church. And twice rather than once. After all, the question of abortion is for many very closely linked to their Christian faith. My choice fell on a Catholic basilica and a Presbyterian church, where I met a compassionate pastor.
I had also traveled to the United States the previous month, just after the leak of the draft judgment. For The duty, this had been the starting point in an attempt to understand if and how this decision was going to transform American society. It was even conceivable that it would have an impact beyond its borders.
I had then selected three states: Mississippi in the south, led by Republicans fiercely opposed to abortion, Missouri in the north, and finally its neighbor, the permissive Illinois.
In Greenville, nestled in a bend of the Mississippi River, more than 80% of the population is black. It’s hard for a white woman to go unnoticed: at the McDonald’s where I stopped to write, employees, all smiles, came every 30 minutes to see if everything was going well. Elsewhere, some attempts to chat with residents have sparked suspicion and sometimes outright hostility. I took the measure of their reactions, then redoubled my efforts to explain the purpose of my questions to reassure them.
Everywhere, various fears were tangible.
In Illinois, my presence in the parking lot of an abortion clinic caused the employees to react, rushing out to check on what I was doing there. In Missouri, the Pro-Choice group has set up its offices in a disused building, near the railroad tracks, in order to protect its employees. My taxi driver initially refused to let me out of his car, judging the place too dangerous.
But the most real fear expressed by the Americans we met—both those for and those against abortion—was how this conflict might further divide their country.