“We’re taking so many steps back,” Ms. McBride, 24, said. “I’ve always been a believer that older men should not be making decisions about women’s bodies. As a single woman in my 20s, I haven’t felt very represented by my government in a while, but this takes it one step further.”
“It’s also like, what else will happen after this?” said Briana Perry, 30, a board member of Healthy and Free Tennessee, a reproductive rights network in Nashville. “Not only when it comes to reproductive rights, but other rights that we have that we thought we were secured through Supreme Court rulings that are now in question.”
The Supreme Court’s decision calls abortion “a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views.” But while Americans have become more likely to say that abortion is morally acceptable, the issue is very much a political one. Friday’s ruling made it even more so, sending the question of how to regulate abortion back to the states — and into a new and even more polarized era.
Both sides quickly pivoted to the fights ahead.
James Bopp Jr., general counsel to the National Right to Life Committee, who has crusaded against abortion since the Roe decision in 1973, called Friday’s ruling “a total victory for the pro-life movement and for America.” Still, he said, the job for anti-abortion forces was “half-done.” The group was assembled for its convention in Atlanta when the decision was announced, and had already drafted model legislation to ban abortion in every state, with exceptions only for risks to the life of the mother.
“That’s going to be an enormous task — there will be an array of forces against us,” Mr. Bopp said. “This the end of the beginning, as Churchill said once. A huge obstacle has been removed, and now we’re going to make sure that the law is used to protect the unborn.”
Troy Newman, the president of Kansas-based Operation Rescue, which staged a long campaign of blockades outside abortion clinics, said the decision still left too much latitude for states like his, largely led by Democrats, to allow abortion.
