The End of Roe

The End of Roe Johanna Schoen (bio) On June 24, 2022, fifty years after the 1973 decision Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, the US Supreme Court overturned the Roe decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. In a sweeping ruling, the Dobbs decision was the final step in a five-decades-long process that began immediately after the legalization of abortion with a protracted battle over access to abortion. Abortion became legal at a time when Second Wave feminism put issues of women's equality at the fore. In 1972, the US House and Senate both voted to propose the Equal Rights Amendment (although it subsequently failed to achieve ratification by the requisite three-fourths of the states). Around the country, women's health activists were educating women about their bodies and health, teaching cervical self-exams and advocating for women's control of their reproduction. When the US Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, physicians and feminist activists immediately began to establish a network of clinics that would offer abortion care. Indeed, feminists took advantage of the legalization of abortion and opened feminist health clinics based on ideals of woman-centered care. A framework of care was central to the articulation of both groups. While women made arguments for abortion rights based on the inability to care for a child in light of a woman's present circumstances and commitments, abortion providers argued that women had urgent reasons to end unwanted pregnancies, that they made moral decisions when they chose to end a pregnancy, and that extending reproductive control to women was essential for a just society. The simultaneous introduction of vacuum aspiration machines to perform first-trimester abortions meant that a previously clandestine and dangerous procedure became safe, quick, and inexpensive. The systematic persecution of illegal abortionists in the 1950s and 1960s had driven abortion underground and turned it into a risky or even deadly procedure for most women. Legalization made abortion the safest and most widely performed surgical procedure in the United States, opening unprecedented opportunities to a whole generation of women. But the provision of abortion care met immediate resistance. Abortion is—and always has been—a key arena for contesting power relations [End Page 828] between women and men. While the decriminalization of abortion made the procedure legal and safe, women were never able to fully control their access to it. The Supreme Court decision in Roe was a conservative decision that left the ultimate control over women's choices in the hands of mostly male authorities—physicians, legislators, and the judiciary. Women's choices were circumscribed by physicians who decided whether to offer abortion procedures and by legislators who determined when and under what circumstances these procedures could be performed. The framing of abortion as a private decision to which women had a fundamental, but negative, right—rather than a positive right that the state had to guarantee—left access to abortion vulnerable to restrictions about where, when, and under what circumstances women might be granted access to the procedure. As the anti-abortion movement gained strength in the 1970s, anti-abortion activists set out to countermand the Roe v. Wade decision. Four developments over the following decades rendered access to abortion unevenly distributed across the country and made the procedure increasingly difficult to obtain. First, legislators eliminated public funding for any aspect of abortion care, thereby privatizing the interest in abortion. As a result, a woman's ability to obtain an abortion depended on her financial resources, turning a right into a privilege. Second, anti-abortion legislators proposed laws to limit women's access to abortion, imposed rules and regulations to prevent clinics from opening their doors, and made operating an abortion clinic cumbersome and expensive. Over the following decades, judges—supported by an overwhelmingly male judiciary—upheld hurdles and restrictions, suggesting that women were not fully emancipated adults capable of moral decision-making. Over the course of five decades, state legislatures slowly undermined women's access to abortion care as the state granted women a nominal right but kept women's autonomy in check. Third, around the country, a vocal and aggressive wing of the anti-abortion movement organized protests

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