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Fifty years ago to the day, the US Supreme Court decision “Roe v. Wade” made abortion legal at the federal level. While this case law was dismantled last June, demonstrations took place in the country on Sunday to defend the right of women to have an abortion.
Slogans and promises, failing to be able to really act for the moment: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris promised on Sunday January 22 to fight for the right to abortion, 50 years to the day after a famous judgment of the Supreme Court .
Several demonstrations took place in the country to commemorate “Roe v. Wade”, a case law dismantled last June by the highest American court, now fiercely conservative and which put an end to the constitutional right to abortion.
In New York, about 300 people marched, with the same slogans as women in the 1970s, such as “My body, my choice” (“My body, my choice”).
Ymoni Shavuo, one of the organizers, 27, remembers crying when the “Roe v. Wade” case law fell. “Today we mourn this constitutional right (…) but I am not discouraged, I am not giving up, I am even more mobilized,” she told AFP.
Kristyn Beausoleil, 48, says that she herself, her two sisters and her mother had an abortion: “The reasons concern only us (…) Our lives would have been really different if we had not had this choice. “
“We should celebrate the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade today,” Joe Biden recalled in a tweet. “Instead, Republican ‘MAGA’ officials have gone to war against women’s right to take decisions about their health themselves,” denounced the Democratic president.
“How dare they?”
Vice President Kamala Harris has joined in this attack. “How dare they?” she exclaimed during a speech in Florida, referring to those Republican officials who want to legislate at the federal level to restrict or even eliminate the right to abortion everywhere in the United States. She also castigated “the laws designed by extremists in certain states including Florida” to restrict access to abortion.
In total, around twenty states governed by Republicans have rushed into the breach opened by the Supreme Court, to which Donald Trump has given a resolutely conservative composition. The family planning organization Planned Parenthood, pointing out that the majority of Americans are in favor of the right to abortion, estimates that one in three women in the United States lives in a state that has taken such measures.
Its president Alexis McGill Johnson felt that “what is happening to patients and medical staff is terrible, but it also revitalizes our movement. (…) We will be there and we will fight. Every day.”
“Non-negotiable”
In his tweets on Sunday, Joe Biden insists that “women’s right to choose is not negotiable” and calls on Congress to pass a law that would take up the terms of the 1973 judgment, imposing itself on conservative states. “We will not back down. And we know that the battle will not be over until we guarantee this right” to abortion in a federal text, said Kamala Harris for her part.
But neither the 80-year-old Democrat nor the vice president has any illusions. One of the two Houses of Congress, the House of Representatives, has just passed into the hands of the Conservatives. This divided Congress that makes a great law on abortion illusory, whether to protect it or undermine it.
The pressure from the religious right, on this subject which has divided America for decades, does not weaken. Thousands of abortion opponents marched on Friday to call on parliamentarians for a national ban.
The president can only issue decrees of limited scope. On Sunday, the White House, for example, promised to protect as much as possible access to pills which make it possible to terminate a pregnancy during the first weeks.
With AFP
