Hard to Believe It's Only Tuesday: SCOTUS Overturns Roe

Here's what happened in abortion news + takes this week.

June 24, 2022

Here’s another edition of Hard to Believe It’s Only Tuesday, a weekly roundup of the top headlines, tweets, takes, and more in abortion news. It’s the one I really, really was not looking forward to writing, but knew I’d have to.

This week — today, Friday, June 24, 2022, 49 years after Roe — the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade (and Planned Parenthood v. Casey), returning the question of when, whether, and how the government should be able to force people to stay pregnant against their will back to the states. While 26 states are expected to ban abortion post-Roe, that doesn’t mean access disappears immediately in all geographies. Use INeedAnA.com to find out the latest about access locally, or follow your local abortion fund on social media.

I usually open the newsletter with an abortion rights protest image — a positive one. Today, I’m opening with this video of cops in riot gear headed to the Supreme Court in anticipation of folks gathering there this afternoon to protest the ruling.

Outlawing abortion is about control — misogyny, racism, classism, and more — and I think this captures the spirit of the Dobbs ruling better than anything else.

The Top Headlines

The Takes

  • Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker: “The future that we now inhabit will not resemble the past before Roe, when women sought out illegal abortions and not infrequently found death. The principal danger now lies elsewhere, and arguably reaches further. We have entered an era not of unsafe abortion but of widespread state surveillance and criminalization—of pregnant women, certainly, but also of doctors and pharmacists and clinic staffers and volunteers and friends and family members, of anyone who comes into meaningful contact with a pregnancy that does not end in a healthy birth.”

  • Melissa Gira Grant in The New Republic: “Navigating the post-Roe world, though, will require going outside the law. As Laurie Bertram Roberts—executive director of the Yellowhammer Fund, an abortion fund based in Alabama, and co-founder of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund—put it when we spoke in the spring, “You have to be able to move in areas that may make people uncomfortable, that may not be fully ‘legal,’ while you are striving for what should be legal.” For all who have spent decades demanding that courts respect the constitutional right to an abortion—the rule of law itself—will they now do something they have argued against? Will they be willing to violate the law?”

  • Reproductive rights legal scholar Mary Ziegler in The Atlantic: “If this decision signals anything bigger than its direct consequences, it is this: No one should get used to their rights. Predicting with certainty which ones, if any, will go, or when, is impossible. But Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is a stark reminder that this can happen. Rights can vanish.”

  • Rewire repro legal expert Imani Gandy in Rewire: “Frequently, anti-abortion advocates will refer to an egg that has been fertilized within the last 30 seconds as a ‘child’ to tug on the heartstrings. Sperm meets egg? Boom! You have a child. They would also be honest that a post-Roe ‘personhood’ world will require balancing the constitutional rights of humans against the constitutional rights of a fertilized egg. And, according to many anti-abortion advocates, the rights of the egg will actually trump the rights of the live, breathing person.”

  • Physicians and abortion providers Daniel Grossman, Jamila Perritt, and Deborah Grady in JAMA on how clinicians can be prepared to handle the post-Roe landscape.

The Tweets

  • Rewire’s Imani Gandy tweets on digital and physical security now.

  • Via CNN’s Melanie Zanona: The US House GOP is looking at a 15-week abortion ban.

  • Wajahat Ali tweets: “Folks, your friendly neighborhood Muslim here. Please don't use Islamic terms to describe the fascist movement in America. It isn't Sharia, which allows abortion, or Islamic law or the Taliban. It's white Christian nationalism. Name it. The radical movement is homegrown.”

  • Physicians for Reproductive Health tweets a quick thread on the gerrymandering of abortion.

  • The Austin Chronicle’s Austin Sanders tweets a thread on the city of Austin, TX’s efforts to protect locals from criminalization in the wake of Dobbs.

The Fuck are We Supposed to Do About It?

That’s all for this week. I’m sure I’ve missed something you’d like to see featured in this roundup, for I am but one woman with a computer and an abortion-news-induced drinking problem. Holler at me — [email protected], or DM me on Twitter, and I’ll try to add follow-ups as I’m able.