The Supreme Court is likely soon to overturn Roe v. Wade.  With its fall, 49-year-old protections for abortion rights under our U.S. Constitution will end.  The imminent fall of Roe is shining a light on how central abortion rights are to women. Under Roe, abortion rights have been rooted in our Constitution and protected by our courts.  If people no longer have control over their own pregnancies, if they don’t have privacy rights preventing laws that criminalize or forbid their decisions, where does this rollback of rights take us?  Are there other ways to protect abortion access?

The answer in California is that our state must and will step in.  A 2002 state law provides protections similar to Roe’s.  Our courts have said that the right to privacy in our state Constitution protects abortion rights. And specific protection for abortion access in California is being proposed in a Constitutional Amendment that may go before voters this November.

So, if Roe is overruled, California will be among the states with their own abortion rights protections. And California is moving beyond legal protections.  Our state legislators are working on a raft of measures to expand abortion access.  Those measures are an outgrowth of the California Future of Abortion Council.  The Council was formed late last year in response to the risk that Roe would fall.  Citizens for Choice actively supports the Council’s recommendations.  To view the Council measures we are supporting, and our full advocacy agenda and successes, visit the Advocacy page on our website at https://citizensforchoice.org/advocacy/.

We are committed to pushing for California to be a haven for women living in states where they do not enjoy access to safe and legal abortion care.  If Roe falls, about 26 states are expected to have bans or restrictions on abortion in place soon afterward.  Such laws will place women’s health and lives at risk.  According to the Guttmacher Institute, 1.4 million women of reproductive age might find California to be the nearest state where they might access abortion care (currently 46,000).   Already, tragic stories are being told of pregnant women residing in Texas under a six-week abortion ban.  In one case, a woman whose pregnancy became unviable after 19 weeks had a harrowing experience, forced to travel to another state to terminate her pregnancy despite the extreme danger to her health.

We invite you, our supporters, to stand with us, to ensure that California becomes a safe-haven state. Because we believe that abortion access is a basic, fundamental human right.

Elaine Sierra

Public Policy Director

By Lynn Wenzel

In 1972 I marched for the right to control my own body. We carried signs. We were loud. And we were angry. Then came Roe. And we relaxed, at least for a while. Folded as it was into the larger fight for women’s rights, we marched on to advocate for specific issues such as work equity, access to loans in our own names, the Equal Rights Amendment and so on. We took our eyes off the ball in the mistaken belief that Roe was “settled law.”

Yesterday, a young woman in her 30s said with a mystified expression on her face, “I just took it all for granted. It never occurred to me that things would change.” Those of us, battle-scarred and wary, had often warned young women to stay heads-up. And now, they are shocked. Well, the antis have not rested for those 50 years—they have plotted and planned to remove the human rights of all people (except white men) and to own only for themselves the right of bodily autonomy.

OUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS

The Fourth Amendment, protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.

The Fifth Amendment guarantees that an individual cannot be compelled by the government to provide incriminating information about herself – the so-called “right to remain silent.”

The Ninth Amendment states that the federal government doesn’t own the rights that are not listed in the Constitution, but instead, they belong to citizens. This means the rights that are specified in the Constitution are not the only ones people should be limited to.

The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted after the Civil War,  prohibits the states from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

All the rights and privileges guaranteed to citizens in the Constitution are covered by these amendments—and this includes women. According to the amendments, women should be protected from unreasonable seizures by the government, including the seizure of their own bodies; women may not be compelled to provide private information about themselves, including pregnancy or the termination thereof; the federal government does NOT own any rights not listed in the Constitution as they belong to the citizens, in this case the woman; and no woman may be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process (see the 1^st and 4^th amendments).

Now, I am no Constitutional scholar, but it seems to me that under our rights women’s bodily autonomy may not be violated in any way. Roe has been standing on these amendments, which have also protected the liberty and rights of Black, Indigenous and Native, People of Color and LGBTQIA+ people. So, as Roe goes, so go all the other rights and protections? Women’s rights are the pathway to liberation for everyone else. The termination of those rights may quite possibly be the beginning of the end of all others.

Alito’s leaked opinion that privacy and liberty must be rooted in ”this Nations Anglo-American history and tradition” is misogynistic and racist. Alito, as a privileged white man, obviously wants to return to early centuries when women were property and Black and Brown women were slaves. As Maureen Dowd wrote in The New York Times on May 8, “Alito is a familiar type in American literature; the holier-then-thou preacher, so overzealous in his attempts to rein in female sexuality and slap on a scarlet letter that one suspects he must be hiding some dark yearnings of his own.”

For now, women who live in blue states as in ours, are safe. But, as the Washington Post recently reported, anti-abortion groups and their congressional allies are already planning for a nationwide abortion ban if Republicans take power. In an interview with USA Today, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said a national abortion ban was “possible” and “worthy of debate.” And he suggested that most Senate Republicans would support a national ban. Thinking of getting around it by ordering abortion pills which now accounts for more than half of U. S. abortions? Think again. States have already been cracking down on mail-order. Last week, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a law that criminalizes mail-order abortion pills, fining anyone who sends pills “via courier, delivery or mail service up to $50,000.” Other states have already banned the use of telemedicine. Some GOP lawmakers are already beginning to reconsider access to contraceptives.

We cannot rest until all women and girls across the country are assured of their rights under the Constitution. We cannot let a small group of white men decide to take autonomy and freedom away from us. Vigilance requires us to recognize and call out the first steps of power erasure. Remember the poem by Martin Niemoller—“and then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak.”