Roe v. Wade overturned: what next?

I have not been able to keep track of all the reactions to the overturning of the Roe v. Wade judgement by the US Supreme Court. I also have my usual wariness of commenting on a situation whose details are beyond my own immediate knowledge - it is too easy to respond to the reporting of what someone said and to then find out that either they said something slightly different or that the fuller context of the remarks gives the quoted part a rather different sense.

What of President Biden?

His original remarks in response to the Supreme Court judgement can be found on the White House website: Remarks by President Biden on the Supreme Court Decision to Overturn Roe v. Wade. These remarks have worrying aspects to them, and reading them in full adds to that sense concern.

It was three justices named by one President — Donald Trump — who were the core of today’s decision to upend the scales of justice and eliminate a fundamental right for women in this country. 

Make no mistake: This decision is the culmination of a deliberate effort over decades to upset the balance of our law.  It’s a realization of an extreme ideology and a tragic error by the Supreme Court, in my view.

It is the idea that a judgement in law that opens the way to pro-life legislation to take effect in states of the US represents an "extreme ideology" that should give cause for thought. First of all, we should resist the idea that to be pro-life is to be an advocate of an "extreme ideology" - and in this phrase, the word "ideology" is as significant as the word "extreme". An ideology takes an aspect or part of a reality, and absolutises it at the expense of the complete picture; and, in doing so, it adopts a position that separates itself from objective reality itself. To be pro-life on the contrary recognises a reality - that abortion takes the innocent life of an unborn child, an unborn child who would otherwise be able to live their dignity as a human person. To argue, on the other hand, that abortion represents health care is to misrepresent the genuine meaning of the term health care as it would be applied in the wider generality of medical practice.

President Biden's reference to Donald Trump, though, highlights a hazard of that style of pro-life activity that allies itself to a particular political stance, a politics that can be fundamentally ideological in its real intent rather than having a genuine concern for the common good. More is needed to build a genuine culture of life in America than the legislative actions of Republican administrations, and too close an alliance to those legislative actions will be counter-productive to the wider building of a culture of life.

It is also interesting to contrast President Biden's narrative that:

The Court has done what it has never done before: expressly take away a constitutional right that is so fundamental to so many Americans that had already been recognized.

with the rather different narrative from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops statement:

“America was founded on the truth that all men and women are created equal, with God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This truth was grievously denied by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling, which legalized and normalized the taking of innocent human life. We thank God today that the Court has now overturned this decision. 

So far as I can tell, the essential import of the judgement to overthrow Roe v. Wade is that abortion should not now be seen in the United States as some form of right guaranteed by the constitution, and should never have been seen in such a way. And yet the barrage of criticism of the decision, following the lead of politicians such as President Biden, ignores this and continues to talk in terms of abortion as some form of human or constitutional right.

What of the culture?

In both the United States and here in the UK, abortion has been legally permitted for so long that it has embedded in medical practice and in the wider culture. The legal permission is only an aspect of that cultural embedding; the widespread hostility shown to the overthrow of Roe v. Wade exemplifies how deep this cultural embedding now is. I have thought for some considerable time now that our conversation about abortion should no longer be one characterised by "a woman's right to choose" or a "woman's right to have control over her own body". The stories of women who have had abortions - both those gathered by supporters of legalised abortion and those opposed - demonstrate the range of constraints that influence their decisions. In many stories, the experiences are such that the word "freedom" (in the full, philosophical sense of the term as applied to human actions) is difficult to apply as a descriptor of the decision making process. I cannot help but feel that, if our public conversation were to focus more clearly on the different narratives of  women seeking abortions, the practice of abortion in our society would change significantly. That conversation would need us to reflect more deeply on the nature of freedom in human acting, and how women seeking abortions can be supported to make decisions that manifest a fuller freedom of choice rather than expressing instead determining constraints. 

Perhaps the jolt given to the idea of abortion as a constitutional right by the recent Supreme Court ruling will enable this wider conversation to take place.