Making Sense of the First Days of a Post-Roe Era

Art by Zeke Barbaro / Getty Images

The description of journalism as "the first draft of history" was perhaps never as literally true as it was Monday night, when Politico, of all people, broke the biggest scoop of the 21st century to date. The D.C. insider tip sheet published a draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, apparently written in February, in which he and his four most conservative colleagues on the U.S. Supreme Court agree to completely overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that access to abortion care is protected by the U.S. Constitution. The following day, Chief Justice John Roberts, who was not one of those five anti-choice votes, confirmed that the document was authentic, but said that SCOTUS has not made any final decisions yet.

Any thought that this might be old news – that we've known since late 2020 at a minimum, after Donald Trump appointed his third justice to the court, that Roe was doomed – has been belied by the speed and intensity of the reaction to the dawn of this unchosen, unwanted stretch of history. Two out of three Americans have never known an era when abortion was illegal, even as its availability has been steadily curtailed across about half the country. Fewer than 1 in 5 Americans and even fewer Texans believe that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, even though that's more or less been the law here since last September. More than 2,500 abortions are performed in the U.S. every day, even as anti-choice Republicans plan out how to make abortion care illegal for everyone now that SCOTUS is out of the way.

All of those people – all of us, that is – are not going to change their minds about reproductive rights just because Samuel Alito feels that protecting choice is not sufficiently "rooted in history." In just a couple of days, the contours of the new era have taken shape. In half of the states (with more than half of the people), abortion rights have already been codified, in some cases written directly into state constitutions. Those places are already making plans for their new status as refuges and safe havens. (Planned Parenthood affiliates in southern Illinois, closer to six different red states than to Chicago, are adding capacity, for instance.) People have learned, quickly, that the majority of abortions performed in the U.S. involve medication rather than surgery, and that those pills can be obtained online with a minimum of subterfuge, just like other forbidden pharmaceuticals (some are sold over the counter in Mexico), and that reputable third-party sources exist to vouch for their safety and effectiveness.

Those things are clearly unalloyed goods compared to the era before Roe; even if many millions of Americans live in places that intend to deny their reproductive rights, they can still have safe, effective, affordable, and only somewhat illegal abortions. Again, nobody's mind is being changed this week; the only question is how brazen we feel like being about telling the weirdo Catholics on the Supreme Court, and the weirdo Evangelicals who've been running the anti-choice grift for decades, to go fall in a hole. Those of us who have no trouble being that brazen are going to have to step up our game on behalf of those who are afraid, for a lot of understandable reasons, to put their own needs first, or to provoke conflict with authorities who have power over their futures. Some people will need you to pay for their abortions, and you should. Some people will need you to ask your sister in Colorado to be on the lookout for a package that needs to be discreetly forwarded to you, and you should oblige. The best way for us to gum up the stupid works here in Texas, with its bounty-hunter scheme, would be for thousands, millions, of us to aid and abet our friends' abortions.

And sure, we should also vote in people who think the government should reflect what its constituents actually believe. We should help our friends in states with flippable Senate races this year – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina – to get new Dems in power and push Joe Manchin into that same hole, so we can codify a federal right to abortion for at least a little while. We should impeach the justices who lied under oath in their confirmation hearings and who looked the other way while their spouses subverted the 2020 election. But we should not forget what we've come to realize this week: Abortion is common. Abortion is normal. It's not a big deal, just like we've decided cannabis isn't a big deal. It is simply part of our lives, and creepy right-wingers only have as much power to change that as they can wrest away from us.