The week that WRRAP hosted authors Kathryn Kolbert and Julie F. Kay at our webinar book tour for Controlling Women: What We Must Do Now to Save Reproductive Freedom, LATimes Columnist Robin Abcarian published an op-ed featuring both authors and the groundbreaking ideas they have to safeguard reproductive rights and access. The full article was published in the LATimes.

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We can’t count on the Supreme Court to save abortion rights. We’ll have to do it ourselves.

We have to face a disheartening fact: This country’s Supreme Court is no longer committed to protecting our constitutional rights.

The justices are believed to be on the verge of overturning Roe vs. Wade, or at least whittling it down to a meaningless stub by allowing brutally restrictive state abortion laws to stand.

Already, the court’s conservative majority has shown that it is disinclined to toss out the blatantly unconstitutional new Texas law that bans most abortions.

Sure, we can argue over whether the legal rationale for Roe — the right to privacy— was imperfect, or whether the court acted precipitously in 1973 and should have allowed states to legalize abortion at their own pace instead.

At this point, all of that is just academic noise.

In 2006, the newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, one of three archconservatives appointed by former President Trump, signed on to a two-page ad that ran in the South Bend Tribune calling for “an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade.”

So let’s not pretend we don’t know how she feels about abortion.

If we can’t rely on the highest court to enforce the legal right to abortion, we have to figure out how to keep abortions accessible some other way.

“We know this will not be the end of abortion rights in the U.S.; rather it is the beginning of a new stage of the fight,” write attorneys Kathryn Kolbert and Julie F. Kay in their new book, “Controlling Women: What We Must Do Now to Save Reproductive Freedom.”

Kolbert co-founded the Center for Reproductive Rights in 1992, the same year she helped preserve Roe as the lead attorney in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, in which a bitterly divided court upheld the right to abortion, but allowed states to impose restrictions such as 24-hour waiting periods and parental consent for minors.

Kay is a longtime reproductive rights attorney who worked with Irish activists to challenge that country’s abortion ban in the European Court of Human Rights. Their efforts were not successful, but Irish voters eventually legalized the procedure in 2018.

Their book is partly a bracing legal insiders’ story about the decades of court battles over abortion and partly a call to citizens to rise up in support of abortion, contraception, sex education, and the rights of the millions of poor women and women of color who have suffered most from grotesque policies such as the Hyde Amendment.

Read the full article
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-10-31/abortion-rights-supreme-court