Suzanne Harrington: Under Trump's eye, America edged closer to Gilead
Refusing Abortion Far Will The Of Pic: Women Consequences Denis To Scannell Lasting And Be Right The Constitutional Long Reaching
An old photo of a young woman with tumbling dark hair and a groovy minidress pops up on my Facebook, smiling and cutting her birthday cake. It’s from Iran in 1973. Underneath, someone has written about how things can change when a government gets religious. The US, with its fondness for calling itself the Land of The Free, likes to hold Iran up as a terrifying example of autocratic theocracy.
Cue women everywhere expelling tea through their nostrils. At Glastonbury, amid rage from everyone from Billy Eilish to Idles, Phoebe Bridgers to Kendrick Lamar, the Gen Z singer Olivia Rodrigo and her surprise guest Lily Allen performed Allen’s 2009 song together, whilst naming the US Supreme Court judges who have overturned Roe V Wade: Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, who has seven children and seems to want everyone else to as well. The last three were appointed by Trump.
This is the legacy of president number 45, himself voted in by religious conservatives who despised him, so that they could, via Supreme Court appointees, push through legislation that would make women push through unwanted pregnancies.
Not so much pussy-grabbing as uterus colonising; Atwoodian dystopia made real. Meanwhile, evangelical Baptist Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former hapless press secretary now running for governor of Arkansas, told a rally the other day, “We will make sure that when a kid is in the womb, they’re as safe as they are in a classroom.” Where to even start...
What I want to know is, in a place that calls itself a democracy rather than a theocracy, how nine individuals can decide - without as much as a vote, never mind a referendum - to reverse the basic bodily autonomy of 50.52% of the population.
How it can literally render tens of millions of people not in charge of their own insides. How does that work? The American Bar Association, in its Supreme Court FAQs section, is no help — it just says that “The nine Supreme Court justices remain the final arbiters of the law, charged with ensuring the American people receive the promise of equal justice under the law.” Except now blobs of cells count more as American people than actual American people.
It's a pendulum, says my sister wearily, of the culture wars wrecking ordinary American lives. She’s a professor of American politics and writes books considerably cleverer than the American politicians she writes about; despite being just back from Glastonbury, she gamely explains how the supreme court works.
To be honest, when I hang up I’m still none the wiser. It still seems like a bunch of unelected ayatollahs decreeing what women can and cannot do with their private bodies. Almost like an autocratic theocracy. What next — the removal of black voting rights? The reversal of equal marriage? Because if they can do this, they can do anything. Unelected, and there for life. Just like Iran.
