Outside the Supreme Court on the day Roe v Wade is overturned, a blue-haired protester is shouting through a megaphone, “I’m atheist and I’m pro-life!” Dressed in a crop top, a bright blue kerchief and a bucket hat decorated with a badge that reads “They/them”, Anastasia Rogers isn’t your average anti-abortion protester.
“For me, it’s just a human rights issue,” says Rogers, who identifies as non-binary. “Like for me, I’m also plant-based. I have a vegan diet, I advocate for animals, and I just feel like every single being has a right to life, no matter how small they are. And if I think it’s wrong to eat eggs because they kill baby chicks... then why would I not think that it’s wrong to kill a baby human?”
Rogers describes themselves as a 29-year-old, San Francisco-based “member of the LGBT community”. Resting from the hot Washington sun under the shade of a tree outside the Supreme Court, they describe how they were on vacation in Florida when they heard the news about Roe v Wade.
“I actually bought a last-minute flight [to DC] as soon as the decision happened,” they say, adding that they wanted “just to come with my friends, celebrate and support”.
“I think a lot of people think pro-lifers are all far-right, conservative old white guys. And, I mean, I have blue hair, I’m pansexual, I’m intersex, I’m non-binary. I have a lot of very left-leaning beliefs and I feel like I’m pro-life for all of life. I feel like in any situation, my views are that everyone should have the right to live, and to pretty much do whatever they want as long as they’re not harming someone else.”
Rogers is far from the only left-leaning protester out to celebrate the ruling that will now take away American women’s constitutional right to abortion care. Jostling alongside the evangelical Christians and the far-right agitators – such as well-known conspiracy theorist Jacob Wohl, who spends his time here shouting at protesting women that they should “go home, back to the kitchen” – is a group of young women from Democrats for Life of America, an anti-abortion group for Democratic voters, whose placards (reading “Pro-life for the whole of life”) are decorated with rainbow flags.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/roe-wade-scotus-protests-abortion-b2109552.html
Rage on, my progressive fellow Soylentils.
EDIT: Most excellent video - the lady nails it perfectly.
https://twitter.com/MechelleChristy/status/1540486945981227009
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 28 2022, @01:20PM (3 children)
Who pays attention to SCROTUS anymore?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 28 2022, @07:14PM (2 children)
Apparently not the nincompoops running around screaming about how they banned abortion, because that's absolutely not what they did.
But here we are; reading comprehension is rare these days.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 29 2022, @01:57AM (1 child)
For many Americans, the Supreme Court decision might as well have banned abortion.
Several states had passed trigger laws prior to the decision, which would go into effect if Roe v. Wade were overturned and impose bans in those states. A significant percentage of states with trigger laws are very restrictive, not even permitting abortion in the case of rape or incest.
Effectively, this requires women to travel out of state to get an abortion. Because many of the states that have banned abortions are clustered together geographically, lengthy travel may be required in order for a woman to get an abortion.
At a minimum, the immediate effect of the Supreme Court decision was for abortion bans to take effect in many states. The distances that women in some cities will need to travel to the nearest abortion clinic [nbcnews.com] may effectively prohibit them from being able to receive an abortion.
Although the Supreme Court ruling did not ban abortion, it did trigger very prohibitive bans in several states.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 29 2022, @05:02PM
That's a critically important distinction. The federal powers are not, at the time of writing, making this call. Pelosi and Schumer have been rumbling about fixing it - what changed? Just tearing away a crap old decision.
The pity is that the logic behind Roe vs Wade was pretty friendly, in that it simply set a bar beyond which government interest couldn't be sustained against personal interests; it was just done so badly that its failure was widely anticipated everywhere except congress, where they decided to sit on their thumbs for a few decades.