The demonstration in Burlington, Vermont, days after the Supreme Court allowed Texas to forbid abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, was defiant but sad. We were a sparse mix of youngsters, gray-hairs, and elected Democrats carrying the usual signs, preprinted bright-pink for Planned Parenthood, yellow for the ACLU, plus a few battered, hand-lettered ones that looked like this was not their first demonstration: “We Won’t Go Back!” they pledged in smudgy magic marker.
I hate to be a downer, or make facile comparisons between past and present, but we as a society have indeed “gone back” to the kind of legal situation that prevailed before the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade and its vital but oft-forgotten companion case, Doe v. Bolton (1973). In narrow terms, what the Court did then was affirm a constitutionally meaningful “zone of privacy” in the space of one’s own body and one’s deliberations with a health care provider, responding positively to a nationwide feminist and faith-based movement to change the abortion laws.
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