4 May 2022 — 1007 mdt

The 55-year-old incident informing my reaction to
Justice Alito’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade

By James Conner

In 1967, I was a student at a small state college in the upper midwest, pursuing a liberal arts degree and serving as an elected member of the student senate. Two fellow senate members — I’ll call them Alice and Joe — took an intense liking to each other. When Alice became pregnant, she had a back alley D & C. She hemorrhaged, and bled to death in the local hospital’s emergency room. An arrest warrant was issued for Joe, who disappeared.

Had Roe v. Wade been in effect, Alice’s D & C would have been performed in a sterile operating room by a board certified surgeon, and she undoubtedly would have lived. Roe saved lives by giving women a legal and medically safe option for ending their pregnancies.

Alice’s death crystalized the issue for me: because women were going to have abortions, the public policy choice was not, as Catholic theologians asserted, abortion or no abortion, but safe abortion or dangerous abortion. When SCOTUS handed down Roe in 1973, women in Alice’s position were saved from coat hanger surgeons in back alley surgeries.

Now it appears SCOTUS will turn back the clock half a century. A draft 98-page opinion, written in early February by Justice Alito, long a critic of Roe, that overrules Roe, was leaked to Politico. The draft is authentic, but dated and may change. Thus far, the leaker has not been identified. The emerging consensus is that the draft was leaked by a supporter of overruling Roe who wants to prevent a wavering member of the majority from switching sides.

There’s no shortage of astute commentary on the leak and the draft opinion. Authors I recommend include Adam Liptak at the New York Time, Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post, Michael Dorf at Verdict, and Mark Graber at The Constitutionalist.

Montana’s constitution has a strong right to privacy. That will make outlawing abortion here difficult — but it will not make it impossible. Our constitution can be amended, and judges of Alito’s genre can be elected to Montana’s supreme court. Reactionary Republicans dominate our legislature and control the executive branch of our government. Unless something changes, in time Montana’s anti-abortion movement, led by religious zealots, will find a way to take us back to the age of back alley abortions that killed Alice.

Alito is old enough to remember the days of back alley abortions. But he is not old enough to know better than to return to those bloody days.