The supreme court’s decision has created a two-tiered class of US citizenship: one for men and one for women. It is a generational tragedy
That it has only been a year since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade and ended the federal right to an abortion feels absurd, almost impossible. How horribly and dramatically our country has changed since then. In a span of just 12 months, thousands of lives have been permanently changed – dreams dashed, intentions scuttled, childhoods abruptly ended, talents and potential suppressed, health risked, and the self-determination of pregnant women snatched from them by a body of unelected jurists who believe that their own sentiments are more important than those women’s dignity.
The decision unleashed atrocities and morbid perversions of medical ethics that have rapidly become routine. Women experiencing miscarriages now wait around in emergency rooms and parking lots, unable to receive treatment until they sicken to the point where sufficiently brutal health outcomes (life-ending or life-altering, depending on the state) become a certainty. Other women, and no small number of girls, now gestate and give birth to infants conceived by their rapists – their coaches, abusive boyfriends, acquaintances, priests, fathers. Still others are forced into torturously monstrous exercises in medical futility, their bodies commandeered and used by the state to birth babies without lungs or heads.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
