The attack on abortion rights, and other horrors sweeping the States, means I can no longer defend the country of my childhood
Source - daily telegraph 25/06/22
It is tempting, as a woman, to respond to the reversal of abortion rights in the United States with a tale of personal experience. I will spare you the details of mine, though rest assured I, like so many millions of other women in the once-liberal West, feel profound relief I was born in an era and a place where women have the right to choose.
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Mine was the second generation of women who knew that if we could not cope with a baby when that particular oncoming train was foisted upon us, we no longer needed to risk dying of sepsis following botched self-abortions or back-street terminations, or to fear being permanently mentally disfigured from forced childbirth. We took for granted that we could have children when ready and only then, without terror of life-changing consequences if a mistake was made.
In Britain, security in these basic rights remains just about sound. But any sense that living in “the West” offers any guarantee of them died last Friday when the Supreme Court in the US, once the leader of the free world, overturned Roe vs Wade as unconstitutional, ending women’s federal protection of the right to abortion. The 13 states with “trigger” laws at the ready for this decision immediately banned termination, and a further nine – nearly half of all states – are set to follow suit.
I grew up in America, and, moving back to Britain at 16, I defended it staunchly to its many detractors: I loathed anti-Americanism. But I can no longer defend the wondrous, dynamic country of my childhood. How could I, when 40 million American women have been plunged into a surreal Handmaids Tale-like hell of clandestine activity, border crossings, and underground abortion pill shipment networks should they need to end their pregnancies?
This rare reversal of constitutional rights is first and foremost a despicable assault on women. But it is also a world-historical cataclysm, the biggest sign yet that America could be about to implode. Political and cultural faultlines have been yawning ever deeper under American topsoil, a smattering that no longer covers or mollifies the monsters raging below. But with Roe, they have deepened into black holes, sucking the country down with centrifugal ferocity.
It’s all happening quickly. The freshly emboldened Justice Clarence Thomas has already asked the Supreme Court to reconsider rulings that protect contraception. There have already been mass-protests, and many fear that the reaction to the Roe decision will include horrible violence.
Enslaved to its constitution, and ever-madder readings of that 233 year old list of rules, it’s hard not to conclude that America is no longer fit for purpose. Judicial attacks on civilisational norms aren’t even that surprising in a country tearing itself limb from limb. America is in a constant death-spiral of mourning mass shootings – 17 so far this year, the most recent on May 24, in Uvalde, Texas, which saw the murder of 19 small children – but its Supreme Court last week actually ruled against gun curbs. As race politics exploded following the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 by a police officer, violence has replaced law. Rioting and looting are common protest tactics in American cities. Far right and far left meet up in cities like Portland to fight. Homelessness is a shocking blight along the coasts. And police have decided not to pursue crimes like shoplifting or turnstile jumping, leaving cities like New York and San Francisco fly-blown and apocalyptic-feeling, with increasingly regular subway shootings in the former.
America’s institutions of state are being trashed. Trump trod on all sorts of norms as president, finally overseeing the storming of the Capitol in an attempt to delegitimise Biden’s win. The paranoid Trumpian right still believes everything from the army to the voting system has been infiltrated and corrupted by Left-wing ideology, while Democrats are now questioning the legitimacy of the Supreme Court itself. There is no middle ground, since each side now thinks it has to beat its opponent comprehensively. Neither side can even agree on the basic ground rules for battle. This is turning the constitution into a suicide note.
The horrible irony about Roe is that the left used to staunchly defend women’s rights and particularly abortion rights; now they won’t even refer to “women” when those rights are taken away, preferring “pregnancy-capable people”. The Right wanted Roe overturned, but the Left let them get away with it, and for this they deserve as much, if not more, blame for betraying women. Trump got into power in part because hard Left types let him, voting for joke candidates over Hilary Clinton because she wasn’t woke enough for them. Eventually, with Biden in office, the Left had a chance to stand up for women. Instead, the Democrats have alienated large swathes of their possible electorate with their pandering to social justice ideology. Having spent the last five years forcing people to police their use of pronouns and to denounce “white privilege”, they find they are in no position to defend the rights that actually matter – or persuade others to help defend them. The only way the Roe decision could be reversed would be Democratic control in the Senate, which would require landslide victories in the upcoming midterms. But thanks to the ideological mess they’ve made of American education, medicine and sport, that’s unlikely to happen. Women have been sacrificed on the bonfire of woke.
The only silver lining is that American political alliances may now have to be redrawn constructively. Abortion is a universal issue that goes far beyond right and left, so sensible people on the right will be forced to join the fight with the woke left. This could force the latter to rediscover common sense. If they do, they might actually be able to bring this nightmare to an end, but by then it may well be too late.
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