Abortion Rights Protest On Cannes' Red Carpet Snapshot | Activist, cast and crew of the film 'Let it be Law' demonstrate for the legalization of abortion in Argentina while walking the Cannes carpet.
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By Dave LIndorff
It's looking like Trump's three nominees on the US Supreme Court, joining three other Republican appointees to give that court its largest reactionary majority in memory is about to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that gave women the right to an abortion.
Such a decision in the current case before the High Court, which involves Mississippi's recently passed ban on the abortion of any fetus where a "heartbeat" can be detected, would be a major loss for women's rights, particularly in the Republican Party-dominated states that can be expected to push rapidly for bans on abortion if they haven't passed such laws already (some 21 such states are said to be preparing legislation to outlaw abortions like Mississippi and Texas have done if the High Court overturns its long-standing ruling denying states the right to ban abortions outright).
But I would argue that in the long run this legal U-turn, if it happens, may prove to be a Pyrrhic victory for the reactionaries and the white fundamentalist Christian zealots whom the Republican Party has been pandering to for decades over this issue of "reversing Wade."
The damage done by Roe v. Wade to broader right-left political debate cannot be overstated. The Democratic Party, since the Roe v. Wade decision was rendered just two days after Richard Nixon's second term began on January 1973, has been able to put forward candidates for state and national office since then whose economic, class, foreign policy, health care, education and environmental positions could be as bad as any Republican's, and still have hopes of winning elections by declaring their support for Roe v. Wade.
Supreme Court nominees by Democratic presidents since 1973 have been lackluster centrists on many issues, but these centrist corporatists in the White House have gotten away with it as long as their nominees vowed to "support Roe v. Wade." There has been no new Thurgood Marshall or William O. Douglas nomminated by a Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama or Joe Biden.
Meanwhile Republicans have used the slogan "Overturn Roe v. Wade!" as a means to mobilize voters dedicated to forcing women to carry their unwanted or damaged fetuses to term to vote for the most reactionary, pro-corporate, pro-Empire, anti-tax, and-education, anti-regulation candidates imaginable, as long as they promised to help undermine Roe v. Wade.
Back in the late '60s and through the early '70s, I recall that fighting for the right of women to control their own bodies was an existential struggle for women and for those who supported women's rights. I'm old enough to remember, and personally was involved in one case, of a woman needing to find a safe abortion back when such things did not exist, or where the few places where such a procedure could be obtained the list was so long people would have needed to make an appointment before getting pregnant in order to get the procedure before the due date.
Those were the days of hospital ERs being swamped with victims of botched self-attempted or quack-performed abortions that had led to emergency admissions for perforated uteruses, critical sepsis infections, and even maternal deaths"
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/if-roe-v-wade-goes-away-so-will-easy-re-elections-for-right-wing-republicans-and-neo-liberal-democrats/
