Outside the U.S. Supreme Court, the slogan was everywhere. On masks and tote bags, posters and banners, women wore it and waved it. As oral arguments began on Wednesday for the most important abortion case in decades, a group started chanting it:
When the justices ruled to protect the right to abortion in 1973, she wrote, they maintained that an unwanted pregnancy would be devastating for many women. Nearly 50 years later, Fitch claims “sweeping policy advances” have eradicated the need for the procedure. With abortion off the table, she argues, women will be empowered to fully pursue motherhood and a career. They can “have it all,” she told The Lily.
As people across the country tuned into the Dobbs case via live stream, many were introduced to the idea that women would be newly empowered in a post-Roe America. Some women embraced the argument; others called it “disgusting.”
Laurie Bertram Roberts, executive director of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, an abortion rights organization, knew this argument was coming.
“For her to stand up and say, it’s 2021 now, women are empowered to have their babies, while she is part of a party that does everything opposite of what would support families and children — it’s absurd,” Bertram Roberts said in an interview before the Supreme Court arguments.
Fitch’s “truth” only applies to privileged people, Bertram Roberts added.
Alison, a 50-year-old living in Montana, rejects Fitch’s argument for similar reasons. (Alison is being identified by her first name because she fears consequences in her conservative community for speaking up about abortion.)
“It would be empowering if the rest of our social programs supported mothers and children, but that’s not the case,” she said. “We’re a society that values birth, but not life after birth.”
Alison said she terminated her second pregnancy after giving birth to a son with a birth defect. He was 2 at the time, and, according to Alison, doctors told her the lifetime medical costs of caring for him could total close to a million dollars.
Alison and her husband were already in over their heads financially, and she doubted whether she could bear a healthy child. With neither of them having health insurance, carrying her pregnancy to term to place her infant for adoption would not have been plausible either, she said.
The argument that abortions empower women doesn’t factor in those who don’t have the resources or support to have a child, said Alison. It’s particularly telling, she added, that most people who get abortions have already had children, like her.
As Alison said: “They’re acutely aware of the physical and economic sacrifices that are involved.”
Jeanie McAndrew Holmes, a 51-year-old restaurant owner in Hammond, La., raised her son mostly as a single mom. They lived in a single-wide mobile home, she said, as she worked long hours as a a waitress. They ate deli meat and mayonnaise for dinner — which she dubbed “ham clouds” to make her son want to eat it — because she couldn’t afford anything else. As hard as it was, she said, she worked her way up to assistant manager and found the experience “empowering.”
“I just did what I had to do,” she said. “We did not live large, but I learned something.”
Holmes, who demonstrated outside the Supreme Court on Wednesday, fully supports Fitch’s argument and hopes to see Roe v. Wade overturned. When she had an abortion at 20, it was the most “unempowered” she has ever felt, she said.
“I was a proud woman because I chose life and I raised that young man. Killing your child is not empowering,” she said.
Pro-life feminism has been around since the 1970s, said Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at Florida State University who specializes in reproductive rights. Back then, she said, some women argued that abortion was a “get-out-of-jail-free card” for men who wouldn’t fork over the government resources women needed to raise children. The concept evolved more recently with the rise of conservative figures like Amy Coney Barrett and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, Ziegler said, who both built impressive careers while parenting large families. (Barrett has seven children; Palin has five.)
“They were held out as examples of women who managed to have it all,” said Ziegler. In her questioning on Wednesday, Barrett, known for her antiabortion views, seemed to embrace Fitch’s empowerment argument, said Ziegler.
Fitch has said her views on abortion were shaped by her experience as a single mom who was able to raise three kids on her own. To handle it all, Fitch said she relied on day care, a tightknit group of friends and a nanny. She does not support paid family leave or government-subsidized child care.
Abortion rights advocates have emphasized that Fitch’s example is not representative of every woman’s, especially as child care remains elusive for many working families. On social media, many pointed to the attorney general’s wealth and privilege as particularly unrepresentative of many people’s experiences.
Even if women could “have it all,” some abortion rights supporters argued that that isn’t the point: The right to an abortion is a matter of bodily autonomy, and an essential part of health care and family planning, they said.
With the Supreme Court appearing poised to uphold the Mississippi abortion law, people on both sides of the debate are reckoning with what that could mean for their lives.
Tory Cross, a 28-year-old health policy advocate based in D.C., was also in the crowd on Wednesday. If she got pregnant, she said, abortion would be a lifesaving imperative.
Cross has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), a genetic condition that impacts all her connective tissues, including those that hold the uterus in place. People who have EDS have a high risk of miscarriages and other pregnancy-related abnormalities. According to Cross, by the time she was 20, she had been told by doctors that her risk of dying from a pregnancy was “especially high.”
Because of that, the ability to have an abortion is front of mind for Cross and her partner. They’ve decided they would only live in places where abortion access would still stand if Roe fell.
“Even if we reached some equality mountaintop for women and people who get pregnant,” she said, “abortion would still be necessary.”
