Ensuring our rights starts at voting booth, long before it gets to Supreme Court | Steve Israel
The bottom line for the Supreme Court’s ruling to take away the constitutional right to choose to have — or not to have — an abortion is this: it abolishes a right every American woman had just days ago. That’s the right to choose what to do with their own bodies.
Is there any more personal, more fundamental right?
A woman’s decision about what to do with her body is so incredibly and intensely personal, that I, as a man, can’t fully understand it. But I will never forget the time many, many years ago when a dear friend agonized over her ultimate decision to end an unwanted pregnancy (not from me). She cried and shook as I walked her to the doctor’s office – and couldn’t put into words how she felt. But at least that young unmarried woman, who wasn’t a girlfriend, could choose what to do with her own body, after she thought and thought about her choice.
Now that the Supreme Court has decided to leave the right to an abortion up to each state, millions of women won’t even be allowed to decide what to do with their bodies if they become pregnant because some evil creep they don’t know, don’t love or don’t like raped them. They won’t be allowed to choose what to do with their own bodies even if their father, uncle or brother impregnated them. Because of that Supreme Court decision, abortions are now outlawed in at least 10 states even for rape or incest. At least two states — Texas and Oklahoma — have laws that allow virtually anyone to sue people who help women get an abortion.
The decision by the court’s conservative majority could also mean the end of other incredibly personal freedoms for millions of us. That’s because one justice in the majority — Clarence Thomas — wrote that previous Supreme Court decisions allowing now-established individual rights like the right to use contraception and marry someone of the same sex should be reviewed since those decisions were based on the same interpretation of the 14th amendment as the right to abortion.
So what can we do to make sure the right to choose what to do with your own body remains a right in states like New York where abortion still is legal? What can we do to try to change laws in states that, because of that Supreme Court decision, now tell a woman she cannot choose what to with her own body?
We must use one right that hasn’t been taken away from us.
We must vote.
We must vote for candidates who vow to uphold our right to choose. We must vote for them not just in state and national elections, but in the most local contests for town and village officials. That’s where many of the officials who will run for higher office and create, enforce or uphold the laws banning abortion get their start. Once some of these officials hold state office, they can try to create voting districts through gerrymandering, which assures that officials with the same views, from the same political party, hold office for years.
If we don’t like what the candidates say about a woman’s right to choose, we shouldn’t choose them.
Steve Israel, a longtime editor and columnist, can be reached at steveisrael53@outlook.com
This article originally appeared on Times Herald-Record: Supreme Court ruling on abortion moves into personal rights: Israel
