JOHN ROBERTS' Senate hearings begin tomorrow. The hearings of a nominee to replace Chief Justice William Rehnquist will be soon to follow. The confirmations of two new conservative justices could lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the end of legal abortion in the United States. That might be the best thing to ever happen to the pro-choice movement in this country.
The state legislative sessions drew to a close this month, leaving behind them an unprecedented record of restrictions on women's rights to contraception and legal abortion. Morning-after pill access has been denied in New York and Massachusetts, where the needs of the citizens, formalized into law by the legislators, have met their ends with the veto pens of Republican governors with White House daydreams. In South Dakota, a "trigger law" to ban abortion effective the moment the Supreme Court overturned Roe was enacted, and Oklahoma now categorizes a fetus a "victim" under assault laws. There's still more damage to be done in Missouri, where Republican Gov. Matt Blunt has called legislators into a special session to vote on three more anti-abortion initiatives.
None of this is enough to register on most people's radar. Ask your average non-activist pro-choice voter and chances are good they'll know none of this. Abortion is, on paper, legal in this country, and even if Roberts is confirmed, there's still a slim majority in favor of Roe on the Supreme Court, so we collectively figure we're okay. But we're not okay, and this piecemeal dismantling of a woman's safe and legal right to choose is death by a thousand cuts.
In a stunning sentence in a recent Glamour magazine article about the decline in support for legal abortion among young women, the reporter recounts how "one young woman in Michigan told me she'd vote for a pro-life candidate over a pro-choice candidate -- but in the same conversation also said she couldn't really say exactly what she'd do if she herself got accidentally pregnant." This is the paradox of our generation; if you can't conceptualize that abortion is actually under threat, it's easy to oppose it with abandon. As author Katha Pollitt said in the magazine article, "[young women] don't really get involved in the politics of it, and they're able to say, "Oh, I'm against abortion," knowing that it's there for them if they really need it."
In his dissent to the 1989 case Webster v. Health Services, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun lamented that "the plurality would clear the way once again for government to force upon women the physical labor and specific and direct medical and psychological harms that may accompany carrying a fetus to term." But over a decade later, it has become clear that the greatest threat to women's lives will not simply be a plurality of Supreme Court justices, but our own apathy that placed them on that bench. For women in their twenties, a world where the United States could literally force you to carry a child to term seems as far removed as the one in which we didn't have the right to vote. Young women voters see no consequence to their choices in the voting booth, and until the cold results of being "pro-life, sort of" and "pro-choice, sometimes" become shockingly clear, will continue to revel in that complacency.
Granted, there are contingents -- young, female, or otherwise -- that honestly are pro-life, do truly see abortion as murder, and do hope fervently for the day that the legal right to choose will cease to be. With them, it is impossible to take exception; they are entitled to vote their convictions. The attitudes reflected in the Glamour interviews and on college campuses, however, seem increasingly to be ones of callous condemnation of women who get pregnant in an age of birth control and the morning-after pill, and of a sort of flippant calculus about how, since there are so many couples that want to adopt babies, pregnant women who can't support a child should just carry it to term anyway. But birth control and morning-after pills aren't as available in low-income and minority communities as they are on manicured college campuses and that whole "baby shortage" argument likely wouldn't resonate with the 134,000 American kids currently living in foster care, waiting for adoptive parents. The bottom line is that either women can control when and how they have a child or they can't, and a reactive or unthinking position on the right to choose places women's autonomy in the hands of the government.
The government's hands are where that right now rests, in the gentlest of death grips that tightens, however slightly, with each passing year. It will take something extraordinary to shake us awake. That something may be the fight of our lives; the struggle to get back a right we always assumed we'd never lose.
Katie Cristol's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kcristol@cavalierdaily.com.
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