![Abortion rights activists rally outside of the US Supreme Court after the overturning of Roe vs Wade in Washington DC]()
Abortion
rights activists rally outside of the US Supreme Court after the
overturning of Roe vs Wade in Washington DC © AFP/Getty Images It’s
a hard time to be an American, and in particular an American woman. The
Supreme Court decision last week to end the national right to abortion
put the US in a totally different category from most other developed
nations and many emerging markets when it comes to reproductive rights.
If you live in Mexico, or Iran, or Chad, things are getting better in
terms of your reproductive freedom. Here, they are getting worse. There
are so many reasons to be worried. Abortions will not be stopped, only
safe ones will. Patients and providers will risk going to jail. Women
who can afford to travel will be able to get an abortion, be it in the
US or abroad; those who can’t (the poor, the young) won’t. It’s
difficult to think of anything more socioeconomically or politically
polarising. How did we get here? As the Financial Times’ editorial board pointed out,
“the fall of Roe was a multigenerational project on the right,
entailing ground campaigns, Federalist Society law school chapters and
the careful vetting of judicial candidates. Liberals are capable of
performing the same organisational feat. The tragedy is that they now
have to.” Yes,
it’s true, they shouldn’t have to — this is a very ugly kind of
politics. But this is also a real wake-up call for the left, which has
for a very long time neglected to play the kind of strategic long game
that the right does. We’ve been too busy tearing ourselves into
ever-smaller interest groups, rather than thinking about the big
picture. That has to change. We must find the “we” in the Democratic
party again. Liberals must put aside their individual identity issues
and focus on human rights, civil rights and labour rights as a whole. One
thing I’ll be watching very carefully is how American business responds
to the situation. Before the overturning of Roe vs Wade, companies
including Yelp, Citigroup, Amazon, Uber and Salesforce stepped up to
help employees who needed access to out-of-state healthcare, providing
transportation, time off, and even legal protection for women trying to
get abortions outside of restrictive states. But as my colleague Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson reported
last week: “The US Supreme Court’s reversal of the constitutional right
to an abortion has handed an instant challenge to business leaders,
caught between their fear of reprisals for taking sides on a polarising
topic and their employees’ dependence on company-issued health
insurance.” Unlike
the progressive stances that many companies have taken around issues
such as diversity, the environment, LGBTQ rights and so on, standing up
for abortion rights after a national court reversal could have negative
legal ramifications. Could companies themselves be sued if they support
women seeking abortions? How will shareholders and investors react to
companies that go out on a limb to champion reproductive rights? This
is complex and unprecedented legal territory, and the blowback had
already begun even before the national ruling came in. In Texas, for
example, a legislator threatened to prevent Citigroup from doing any
municipal bond offers in the state following its announcement that it
would pay travel expenses and give time off to women seeking
out-of-state abortions after Texas passed its own restrictive law. Still,
this may turn out to be a moment for business to shine. Last week,
Michael Bloomberg called the overturning of Roe “the worst attack on the
rights of American women in generations”. Big companies such as Levi
Strauss and JPMorgan are pledging to make sure that employees get the
support they need to access reproductive care no matter where they live. And
it’s businesses, not legislators, who are on the right side of the
majority of the American public. A CNN poll conducted by SSRS found that
59 per cent of people said that if Roe (which was never a perfect legal
solution for the abortion issue, it must be said) was overturned, they
would want their state to set more permissive laws around abortion.
Democrats will undoubtedly be pushing that point hard in advance of what
will certainly be the most brutal midterm elections in memory. |