The abortion debate will cleave the U.S. in two

Rosemary Westwood is a New Orleans-based journalist who covers abortion and public health.

Kim Gibson looked around. A line of activists held towering signs on sticks, like sails on a tall ship, featuring images of bloody fetuses – signs declaring that abortion is murder. A woman on a megaphone screamed that abortion supporters would “burn in hell.”

Police barricades separated the competing rallies and blasting sound systems for and against abortion rights outside the U.S. Supreme Court, and Ms. Gibson stood on the side of abortion access. But the “antis,” as Ms. Gibson called them, had pretty much overrun them.

“It’s a shame,” she said. “It’s a shame people don’t realize what’s going on until it’s too late.”

This was just a physical representation of what had been going on for decades, she felt, as anti-abortion activism swelled into a powerful political movement in America, while Ms. Gibson, who organizes escorts for Mississippi’s last abortion clinic, in Jackson, can’t find enough volunteers.

“It’s very emblematic. There’s more of them than there are us, because they’re engaged in a way that other people aren’t,” she said.

I have been at many protests for and against abortion rights in the U.S. One thing has been true for at least the past five years: both sides are complete in their conviction, but – despite statistics showing that more Americans want women to have the right to choose – only anti-abortion groups know they are winning the legal battle.

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When I arrived, around 7 a.m., anti-abortion protesters had already begun to pack First Street NE in Washington D.C., outside the U.S. Supreme Court. Eventually, there would be many hundreds – possibly twice as many as on the other side. Media crews and cameras lined the lawns beside the court, whose iconic white marble pillars and yawning stone steps loomed beyond the crowds. Later that morning, in a vaulted hall nearly emptied by COVID-19, the nine black-robed justices would hear oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case over whether to uphold a 15-week abortion ban passed in Mississippi. They would debate whether women own their bodies or the state does, and whether a zygote, an embryo or a fetus is a full human life akin to my one-year-old son’s. Through their questions, they would tip their hands.

Nearly 50 years after the 1973 decision that embedded abortion as a constitutional right, five conservative justices, three appointed by former president Donald Trump, signalled they were ready to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Such a move would be cataclysmic. Without constitutional protections, 24 states, mostly in the south and Midwest, are likely to ban nearly all abortions. In such a future, the U.S. would be cleaved in two: Places where women are forced to carry pregnancies and give birth, and places where they’re not. Places where fetuses have full personhood, and places where they don’t.

Outside the courtroom, there was already the sense that this case would be different. On the right side of the barricades, the “Empower Women, Promote Life” rally hummed with anticipation. Protestors held their signs (“Life is a human right” and “I am the pro-life generation”) and huddled around super-sized carafes of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in the morning chill.

It was quieter on the other side of the barricades. Fewer people, fewer signs. A group of women in yellow danced and sang in a circle: “There is work to be done,” they sang. “I am on your side.”

Mississippi’s Attorney-General Lynn Fitch, whose office organized the anti-abortion rally, told the crowd before going into the court that scientific and technological advances showed abortions end human life, and cultural advances meant women don’t need abortions to participate equally in society – an argument rejected by economists who wrote a brief to the court stating that it’s been access to abortion that has allowed women’s advancements.

Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood worker made famous by the book and movie about her conversion to an anti-abortion activist, apologized to women for abortions she’d aided. At one point, a speaker led the rally in the Our Father prayer.

Hundreds of students from the prominent evangelical college Liberty University had been bused in for the rally. A group from the college’s Students for Life group carried models of 16-week old fetuses in their hands, roughly the size of a pear. One compared abortion to slavery.

Bethel Hill, a 73-year-old former nurse from Kansas City, Miss., said she’d seen Roe decided and had been waiting for this day.

“I know five couples that would adopt a baby immediately,” she said. She knew someone who had sought not a baby already born, but the surplus fertilized eggs of strangers. “A friend of ours, she’s carrying a frozen embryo that she adopted, and she’s nine months pregnant with him. And she’s already given birth to one frozen embryo, and he’s a little boy.”

Increasingly, the anti-abortion movement has solidified around the idea that conception equals human life, and so it promotes the adoption of unused fertilized eggs and opposes some fertility treatments, in addition to opposing any rape or incest exceptions for anti-abortion laws, even for children. Its ultimate aim is to either pass a law or win a Supreme Court ruling establishing the personhood of every fertilized human egg. Ms. Hill had travelled with a group from her church including Lattice Hicks, a Black woman who said abortion depletes the Black community, which she said will thrive when abortions are banned.

“I think that abortions target people who are less fortunate, who are less educated, and just don’t really have the zeal or the knowledge of God,” she said.

On the other side of the barricades, Laurie Bertram Roberts, an activist and Black woman who founded abortion funds in Mississippi and Alabama, railed against the idea that Black women who have abortions are committing genocide – a common claim among anti-abortion groups stemming from the fact Black women are statistically more likely to have abortions.

“I don’t see y’all out here fighting for better access to birth control. I don’t see y’all out here fighting for better access to diapers. I don’t never see none of you out here for protests for better water in my city!” she screamed to the rally of abortion-rights supporters.

She noted Mississippi’s high infant and maternal mortality rates, which are far worse for Black women and babies – rates that advocates fear will rise if abortion is outlawed.

“Y’all not concerned with Black children once they’re here. Y’all don’t care about our babies when they shot in the streets. Y’all don’t care about our babies when they locked up in jail. Y’all don’t care about our babies when they not educated. So hush,” she said.

Shannon Brewer, director of Jackson Women’s Health Organization, told the crowd that their support is keeping her going. Since September, when a radical six-week ban took effect in Texas, thanks to a clause that charges citizens with enforcing the law, Texas patients were filling up her clinic back home with women who were desperate and begging for help, she said. “It’s our turn to fight for our children.”

Monica Simpson, who leads the Georgia-based reproductive justice organization SisterSong, told the crowd that after years of southern states, particularly, passing compounding abortion restrictions, and years of lawsuits that have left a handful of states with only a single abortion clinic, it was time to switch from defence to offence. “When we get the ball, things are going to change! When we get the ball, lives will change! When we get the ball, liberation is ours! Do you feel what I’m saying, good people?”

The question is how supporters lost the ball to begin with. Polling has long shown a majority of Americans want abortion to remain legal. Recently, Pew Research Center found 59 per cent of Americans support abortion in all or most cases and a Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll found American support keeping Roe v. Wade 54 per cent to 46 per cent. But if a majority of Americans truly support abortion rights, they have not been acting like it.

Founded through the marriage of conservative evangelicals and the Republican party, the anti-abortion movement is massive in power and scope. Though it claims atheists and Democrats among its numbers, speakers at the anti-abortion rally were predominantly Christian, conservative and white, and many were leaders in the country’s most powerful anti-abortion legal and political groups: Americans United for Life, the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Susan B. Anthony List, and The Heritage Foundation, groups that co-ordinated efforts to appoint skeptics of abortion rights to the Supreme Court. They had come to celebrate.

There is some institutional support of legal abortion in America, including from leading medical associations and the American Bar Association, which warned the court against overturning such a landmark decision simply because the reproductive rights stalwart Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in late 2020 and Mr. Trump placed Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative evangelical, in her seat. But the movement to protect and expand abortion access is far smaller, and scrappier.

At the rally, the abortion rights speakers were predominantly Black and the mood was defiant. Women told their stories of getting abortions – and in one case, of being denied an abortion and ending up homeless.

“Abortion won’t stop,” said Stephanie Nash, a Black woman who’s had two abortions and works for a network of abortion clinics called Whole Woman’s Health Alliance. “We’re just going to have to be strategic in how we support each other and support patients.”

The court will likely wait until the summer to issue a decision. In those months of limbo, it will feel like the status quo. And then, in all likelihood, the U.S. Supreme Court will set off a bomb in American life. The anti-abortion movement will have won its most coveted battle. The question then becomes: Who else will fight?