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BY SAMANTHA WOHLFEIL
Washington state prepares for an influx of patients if abortion regulation is handed over to the states
MY BODY, STATE’S CHOICE? bortion-rights supporters gather in downtown Spokane roughly 24 hours after Politico posts a leaked draft of a U.S. Supreme Court majority opinion showing the court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. With nearly 50 years of precedent enshrining the right to safe, legal abortion now at risk, the crowd of about 100 people assembles outside the Thomas S. Foley U.S. Courthouse in the rapidly planned rally May 3. Speakers from Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho, as well as supporters from other organizations, lead the crowd in chants, sharing their concerns and intent to continue fighting for reproductive autonomy. “No back alleys in the night!” the crowd chants. “For safe choices, we will fight!” Later, a young girl leads the crowd. “My body!” she shouts. “My choice!” the crowd responds. One woman holds a sign that says, “We are not ovary-acting.” She’s dressed as a handmaid from Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which depicts a dystopian future America where a cultish Christian society forcibly impregnates the few remaining women who haven’t been sterilized by environmental pollution. In the book, husbands rule over all, not allowing their infertile wives, who hold a higher place in society than handmaids, to read. The wives participate in the ritual rape of the “handmaids” whose children they will later steal and raise as their own. Wearing a long red cape and a mask meant to symbolize being silenced, the woman asks to be identified as the characters in the book are: “of” the men who control them. In this case, she refers to the conservative Supreme Court justices poised to overturn the 1973 ruling. “I’m OfSamuel, I’m OfBrett, I’m OfClarence, I’m OfJesse, who is the husband of Amy Coney Barrett,” the woman, a Spokane mother of three, tells the Inlander. “I’m Of whoever has decided that this is the time they’re going to strip away our rights.” Like others at the rally, she worries about women in rural
communities, people of color and those who are marginalized, for whom overturning Roe could mean the complete loss of abortion access. She recognizes privilege and the fact that wealthier women and White women will likely continue to have access, even if it means flying or driving to another state or country. If the court overturns Roe in the way that Justice Samuel Alito suggests in the 98-page leaked draft, some at the rally ask, what could be next on the chopping block? The right to access contraception? The right to marry someone of the same gender? These decisions were also rooted in arguments around a right to privacy that was interpreted from the Constitution’s liberty guarantees and its amendments. “What’s next is they’re coming for LGBTQ rights. They’re coming for our right to love who we want. They’re coming for our right to live the way we want,” OfSamuel tells the Inlander. “Six years ago, when we had the Women’s March, people were like, ‘Oh, calm down. Don’t worry, this is never gonna be overturned. No one needs to worry about Roe v. Wade, that’s safe.’ Well, we were not overreacting, and this is exactly what happened.”
WHY ROE IS IN JEOPARDY
The current case in question, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, asked the highest court in the land to weigh whether Mississippi’s restrictions on abortions after 15 weeks (which is before viability outside of the womb) should be allowed to stand, or if it should be struck down for violating the standards set by Roe and the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed the right to an abortion and reinterpreted the earlier ruling. The Supreme Court isn’t expected to release its official ruling in Dobbs until June or July. Until then, Roe remains the law of the land and access to safe and legal abortion remains a federal right. Roe and Casey held that states cannot restrict abortions before a fetus is viable outside the womb, which with modern medicine is somewhere around 23 or 24 weeks. ...continued on next page
MAY 26, 2022 INLANDER 17