Overturning Roe v. Wade

May 30, 2022 | Rise Up Collective

In May 2022, a leaked judgment from the Supreme Court of the United States revealed that the overturning of Roe v. Wade is likely in progress. This 1973 decision prevented state governments from unduly restricting abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy, with increasing potential for restrictions in the second and third trimesters.

Since then, changes to abortion laws in some states have worked to limit access in other ways–for example, by requiring clinics providing abortions to adhere to ever-more restrictive regulations, or by mandating a waiting period between the first appointment and the termination of pregnancy—but state legislatures were not, in the wake of Roe v. Wade, able to prohibit abortion outright. As political scientist Kelly Gordon writes in the Globe and Mail, the overturning of Roe is the culmination of the longstanding efforts of anti-abortion activists who have been “chipping away” at abortion access for decades.

The fall of Roe means that states will be able to simply make abortion illegal, which will immediately result in total abortion bans in eighteen states, with bans on abortion after six to eight weeks in others.

While it is an understatement to say that is a major setback for women in the United States, the decision has made those committed to reproductive justice in Canada (and elsewhere) take a second look at the potential vulnerabilities in access where they live. For those who mobilized in the 1970s and 1980s for access to abortion on demand, the rolling back of Roe is both personal, and political, and raises concern about ongoing access to care.

The Rise Up Archive contains writing on abortion activism in Canada and the United States, and here, we highlight some of the articles published in feminist periodicals over the years that address the specific gains made by Roe v. Wade and historic attempts to overturn it.

“The Overturning of Roe vs. Wade” (Fall 1989)

In a special issue of The Womanist (Fall 1989), Nicole Jasmin examines the implications of Webster v. Health Services, in which the US Supreme Court upheld part of a Missouri law that restricted the use of state funding for abortion care (p.16).

Jasmin quotes at length a dissenting opinion which recognizes that the majority decision “implicitly invites” state legislatures to effectively erode the gains made in Roe “to enact more and more restrictive abortion regulations in order to provoke more and more test cases, in the hope that sometime down the line the Court will return the law of procreative freedom to the severe limitations that generally prevailed in the United States before January 22, 1973.”

“Chipping Away at Choice” (1989)

This article for Rebel Girls Rag by Julia B (part of an issue on reproductive freedom) describes the many ways that abortion rights have been undermined since the time of Roe v. Wade (p.3). The “piecemeal attacks” addressed in the article include the introduction of the 1976 Hyde amendment (eliminating federal funding for abortion care, including under Medicaid), laws requiring parental consent for teenagers seeking abortions, as well as anti-choice organizing in and around clinics.

(Another article in the same issue — “Roe vs. Wade: A Collision Course” by B. Lee — focuses on the terms of Roe vs. Wade and the potential for its overturning in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (p.6).

“Your Body is a Battleground” (1992)

This article by Gitanjali Maharaj (p. 37) in Diva: A Quarterly Journal of South Asian Women (in an issue entitled “Our Reproductive Rights”) examines the challenges to women’s health care in the wake of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a case in which the US Supreme Court upheld Roe while effectively giving “individual states the legal authority to make it as difficult as possible for women and minors…to seek reproductive health care.” The article examines the intersections of racism and classism in “the women’s health care industry.”

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