The Supreme Court of the United States has struck down abortion this Friday. This ends almost half a century in which Americans decided on their pregnancy. The ruling affects some 36 million women across the country, who will be able to see how vetoes and stricter laws are approved in several conservative states. But the ruling leaves, above all, several victims in a pink building with a green roof in Jackson, Mississippi. The Women’s Health Organization, the only clinic in this state of three million people, was the plaintiff in the lawsuit that opens a new era of punishment for abortion in the country. This Friday they have been defeated by judge Samuel Alito. “You will not see me cry,” said Derenda Hancock, an activist who has spent nine years defending clinic patients from religious fanatics, after the sentence.
“I do not know what will happen. Nobody knows very well”, said Hancock, who since 2013 escorts women who want to abort. “Some say the clinic must close its doors immediately, others say we have ten days,” she explained, squatting down and looking dejected. Even though Washington’s decision had not been made known, everyone was already waiting for it in that sense and with great regret in this clinic in the capital of Mississippi. The days were counting since the draft ruling was leaked to the media in May.
“There will be no mercy for those who have not had it. We have shown no mercy in this country. So people will cry and party and then go home. Our work here is done. You don’t retire until the Lord retires you, Christian. Until the Lord takes you home!” shouted a bearded white man this morning as a celebration. He is one of many members of evangelical churches in the region who had come to the center to demand its closure for years.
Jane Roe, the alias of Norma McCorvey, was for decades the biggest name to talk about abortion in the United States. Now another woman’s name will go down in history as the one that buried the legacy of the landmark 1973 ruling. Lynn Fitch, Mississippi’s attorney general, is the first woman to hold the office and the first Republican to do so since the late 19th century. It was she who brought the Thomas Dobbs case (the state health officer) to the Supreme Court. v. Jackson Women’s Health Clinic. The conservative lawyer asked the Constitutional Court to dismiss Roe against Wade to allow the entity to declare abortion illegal after 15 weeks, two months earlier than what the legislation allowed.
When she presented the law, in July 2021, prosecutor Fitch assured that the end of abortion is a way to “empower women” to reach their “maximum potential”. She held herself up as an example of a woman who, despite being divorced, was able to raise three children and reach the highest echelons of local politics. “You have the option to achieve all your dreams and goals and to have all those beautiful children too,” he said in an interview in September. Fitch’s was just one of nearly 550 court moves launched by Republicans in 2021 to block abortion access.
Fitch, the daughter of a financier who made his fortune as a moneylender in the South, bears little resemblance to most of the women who emerge from what was Mississippi’s last clinic. The center serves, on average, about 300 people each week. 70% are black. This in the State where African Americans are 37% and is the region with the lowest average income in the entire country, according to census figures. Patients are accompanied by their mothers or friends. Some for their boyfriends. Cars with license plates from Louisiana, Alabama or Texas, where the conservative majority in the local Congress approved in December a rule that prohibits abortion from six weeks, leave the parking lot of the clinic. Clinic employees say that since last December, when the veto came into effect, many Texans have come here to terminate their pregnancies.
The decision of the Supreme Court can cause a domino effect in 26 states, according to the Guttenmacher Institute, which studies reproductive policies for women. They would take advantage of the decision to locally approve more restrictive laws now that the possibility of facing a trial of unconstitutionality has been cleared up. With the fall of Roe, thirteen states have trigger clauses that take effect almost immediately. One of those is Mississippi, where it is enough for the prosecutor to publish the order in a local administrative bulletin in the next few days for it to take effect. Whoever violates these clauses faces 10 years in prison. The future is also bleak for five other states that have only one abortion clinic.
Recent polls questioned whether Americans would support the decision adopted this morning by the Supreme Court. 61% opposed dropping the fabled legislation, according to a poll this week by USA Today and the University of Suffolk. That majority includes 30% of people who identify themselves as GOP voters. A similar number, 63%, believe this should be legal in almost all cases. They were also in favor of a national law regulating this right instead of leaving the responsibility to the States, which is the path that the controversial ruling opened this Friday.
#Supreme #Court #ruling #abortion #falls #blow #Mississippi #clinic #lost #case