Remember Roe - Defend Abortion Rights!

Three years ago, the US Supreme Court ended 43 years of access to legal abortion, the first time the Supreme Court has removed a previously recognized fundamental right. Dobbs v Jackson represented a victory for the far right campaign against bodily autonomy for pregnant people.

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I live, hundreds of people filled the streets to march. Led by the newly formed Reproductive Justice Action of Milwaukee (RJAM), the march included people of different ages, races, gender and sexual identities, all of us recognizing that our ability to determine the kinds of lives and families we wanted to create were under attack. 

My life has been deeply impacted by the successful struggle of generations of feminists for access to legal abortion. A result of this struggle, the 1972 Supreme Court decision, Roe v Wade, legalized abortion and made it accessible to more (though not all) pregnant people through federal funding of reproductive healthcare.

As a young woman, I accompanied friends to get low-cost pregnancy tests and, when necessary, abortions at clinics run by Planned Parenthood or local feminist organizations. I had a couple of abortions and experienced no legal or health consequences from these difficult decisions. The legalization of abortion access gave pregnant people the right to decide when and if we wanted to become parents.

After the birth of my first daughter, a much-wanted second pregnancy became dangerous to me and to the fetus. Although the prognosis was grave, only one healthcare provider chose to explain that I could travel out of state to obtain an abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Outlawed by many states, this procedure remained legal in a few places.

Ultimately, I traveled to the Wichita clinic run by Dr. George Tiller, who began performing abortions because his rural patients asked for them. I was fortunate to find someone willing to explain that this was an option and lucky to be able to afford the out of state travel. A few years later, Dr. Tiller was murdered by an anti-abortion extremist while attending church.

The Dobbs decision ends the federal right to abortion and curtails federal funding to reproductive healthcare that includes it, in the US and around the world. In states that have not already outlawed the practice, the question of abortion access becomes a local question. In Milwaukee, RJAM has fought against a “trigger law,” a tyrannical anti-abortion maneuver common to many states in which the fall of Roe v Wade immediately triggers a wide ban on reproductive justice. Instead, RJAM demands that Milwaukee County hold a public referendum on the issue.

The right of bodily autonomy is a deep one. Along with freedom of reproductive choice and gender expression, it includes habeus corpus, which literally means “we have the body” and forbids detention without cause, as well as the right to move geographically. That right is also under siege as the Immigration Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) cruelly targets immigrant communities.

Today, I fight for the rights of my daughters and their generation to decide how they want to live in their bodies, express their gender, and whether they want to become parents. The right to bodily automony connects so many of the current struggles that bring us together and out into the streets.

See you there!

In solidarity

Rachel Ida Buff

Rachel is a writer and working historian currently teaching and living in Wisconsin. 

https://syracuseculturalworkers.com/collections/keep-abortion-legal-and-safe