Saturday marked the one-year anniversary of the day the United States Supreme Court officially struck down Roe v Wade, a five-decade old legal precedent that theoretically protected abortion access nationwide on the basis of a constitutional right to privacy. In practice, it was already all but impossible to access abortion in some states and localities, but that situation has only gotten considerably worse since the high court’s ruling allowed Republican-controlled state legislatures to pass outright draconian bans.
Groups opposed to reproductive rights and groups advocating for those same rights both marked the day with a variety of events, with Republicans and Democrats both testing out a 2024 electoral strategy of painting the other side as “extreme” on the issue. Republicans, who are extreme in their desire to control women, queer people, and anyone who deviates from cishet white patriarchal Christian norms, repeated the same old lie about Democrats supporting abortion “right up to and after birth.”
Given that this line did not work for Republicans in the 2022 midterms, in which I correctly predicted that support for abortion rights would help Democrats, the fact Republicans continue to use it now would seem to indicate they see no other options, since Democrats will certainly not allow them to ignore the issue. Meanwhile, many Republicans are openly calling for a national abortion ban, something that will undoubtedly work against them in 2024.
