"This is a colossal mistake!" America protests against the abolition of the right to abortion

Ivan Zubov

In the United States, mass protests began against the scandalous decision of the Supreme Court of this country. As you know, on June 24, he canceled the 1973 ruling, according to which the country's federal authorities guarantee the right to terminate a pregnancy. “The constitution does not give the right to abortion, and the right to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,” the court said in the ruling. Thus, the United States has lost the constitutional right to abortion, and if Congress does not take action, this right will be determined by the states. Nearly half of the states now have or will adopt anti-abortion laws, while the other has adopted strict measures to regulate the procedure.

Recall that we are talking about a revision of the 1973 precedent, which is known in US history as "Roe v. Wade."

In 1970, having become pregnant for the third time, American Norma McCorvey planned to have an abortion, but the laws in the state of Texas, where she lived, allowed this only in case of a threat to the life of the mother or rape.

She failed to prove the fact of rape in court. After that, she was advised to contact two social activists and lawyers who were just looking for a woman on whose behalf they could file a lawsuit that would set a legal precedent for the whole country.

The case, in which McCorvey appeared under the pseudonym "Jane Roe" and the defendant was District Attorney Henry Wade, reached the US Supreme Court and ended in an American-changing victory for the plaintiffs.

Then the Supreme Court decided that a woman can have an abortion until the moment when the fetus becomes viable, based on the right to the inviolability of the person. At the same time, the ruling stated that viability means the ability to live outside the uterus, which usually occurs between the 24th and 28th weeks after conception.

Since then, the precedent decision has been used repeatedly to restrict or repeal state laws that restrict the right to abortion. Now they have the opportunity to independently decide whether women can terminate a pregnancy and for how long in their territory.

American lawyer Yulia Nikolaeva is sure that this decision is a step into the past:

“The fate of the fundamental rights of Americans was in the hands of archaic reactionary hypocrites who could not stay away from politics.

Now half the states will ban abortion completely, which will inevitably lead to a huge number of problems from clandestine abortions and death of women to the emergence of a vast criminal market for gynecological services of dubious quality. In those states that do not completely ban, they will be removed from the list of services covered by insurance, making abortion an expensive operation that is beyond the reach of a huge category of women. The consequences, as with the ban, will only harm, but certainly will not lead to a decrease in the number of unwanted pregnancies and an increase in the birth rate. After all, we've been through all this before. They just took and threw the country back half a century ago. Poor Ruth Ginsburg is rolling over in her grave. Although she criticized the decision in the Roe v. Wade case, it was not for the essence, but for the argumentation, which was based not so much on the rights of women as on the rights of doctors.

The new decision of the Supreme Court is a huge step back in the development of society in general and in the field of women's rights in particular. A colossal mistake…”

But the writer and journalist Lev Usyskin believes that the endless discussion about a woman's right to an abortion, in essence, is not legal, but natural science or philosophical:

“It boils down to the establishment of one single fact: from what moment the fetus should be considered a person. That is, it requires a definition of the concept of man. Up to this point, a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy is unlimited. After - only for three reasons: 1. according to the principle "the life of the mother is more valuable than the life of the child" 2. according to the principle "some defects in the fetus do not give him the right to life, although technically he will be viable after birth." 3. and according to the principle "the victim of rape is not obliged to give birth to a child from his rapist".

All other arguments of a pseudo-legal nature, such as “you need it, you are to bear it”, “this is another person and I am not obliged to feed him with myself” are untenable and are easily broken by generally accepted provisions: for example, “no one forced you to become pregnant, which means that this is a voluntarily taken by you responsibility" or, say, "there is responsibility for intentionally leaving a person in danger."

However, it is possible to consider the question of what is and what is not a person just to be considered legal, as a manifestation of some public consensus of justice.

Well, it is clear that no rules for restricting abortions will be fair if a woman does not have the right to freely refuse a born child. In my opinion, this is how a free legal adoption market should be with a developed toolkit: forward transactions, etc.”