Editorial of the “World”. A decisive battle for the rights of women has committed Wednesday 1 December to the Supreme Court of the United States. By choosing to seize a law voted by the Conservative State of the Mississippi restricting the use of abortion, instead of relying on the decisions of interim bodies which had noticed its unconstitutional nature, the highest judicial proceeding From the country had already shown his desire to fight. It has also maintained in force, before deciding on the merits, another even more restrictive law adopted in Texas.
This offensive is not improvised. She crowns, on the contrary, years of mobilization against the famous judgment Roe v. Wade, rendered in 1973. He sanctioned the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, authorized until the twenty-second week instead of fifteen, as the Mississippi today wants, in order to open a first breach in this right.
This stop is one of the most symbolic targets of the cultural war engaged by the American religious right for almost four decades. The imperative to return to Roe v. Wade is hammered, election after election. It is justified in the name of a sacredness of life that also disappears spectacularly from the conservative discourse when it comes to the death penalty.
This obsessive mobilization has borne fruit benefiting from the iniquity of the US election system. Donald Trump, elected president without winning the popular vote, has appointed three judges selected by the Federalist Society, a conservative lobby. The latter, named for life, were confirmed by the Republicans of the Senate, from the majority of rural and sparsely populated states, after the elimination of the qualified majority once necessary.
Republican relentlessness
Wednesday’s hearing has shown that the Conservative camp, now six judges against only three progressives, maybe on purpose. Although prudent as always in this area, the interventions of judges appointed by Republican presidents have suggested that they could validate, at the end of their debates, in a few months, the law of Mississippi, paving the way for other disputes And, finally, to a questioning of the national reach of the right to abortion.
The price to pay for the republican fierceness for American democracy would not be negligible. Such a revirment from the 1973 judgment, the latter having been reinforced by a second judgment in 1992, shall devote the politicization of one of the few institutions still relatively spared by the extreme polarization which is currently making the United States a counter Model.
By legalizing, in 2015, the marriage between people of the same sex, another scarecrow of the Conservative camp, the Supreme Court had intelligently accompanied a major evolution of American society. The latter has been done since the subject of a solid consensus, including a significant part of the Republican camp.
He would otherwise go if that same court pronounced in favor of a return on the right to abortion. The latter has indeed in the opinion of such strong support as stable, as confirmed, on 16 November, the results of a survey published by the Washington Post, with 60% favorable opinion (against 27% of the opposite opinions). The conservative crusade against the rights of women thus appears for what it is: the expression of the tyranny of a minority.