I Reckon: As goes the South, so does the SCOTUS

When I was on the road down to Los Angeles with my mom in tow to help me move into my new, unreasonably overpriced apartment for the upcoming academic year, we had a lot of long conversations and venting sessions about a wide range of things: unruly drivers, my future, whether or not I’ve been going to church — which I haven’t. It might just be me but the triumphant “Fight On” at the end of mass is jarring to me. I grew up going to Sunday school and I was an altar server, believe it or not. I grew up around folks, like my Sunday school teacher, who recounted almost to the point of tears about how they would go into abortion clinics and talk women out of getting abortions. 

In a post-Roe world, I wince at the thought that folks like my Sunday school teacher are in any way jubilant over the new reality that women all across America have to live with. In a lot of ways, though, I think we never put up a good fight against anti-choice advocates. When I say we, I’m mainly talking about those involved in politics and especially those in the supposedly feverishly pro-choice Democratic Party. I mean those in charge of national party strategy, the establishment, those who saw incremental encroachments on a person’s right to choose yet didn’t see anything worth getting worked up about.

Hindsight is 2020, but let me take y’all on a walk through memory lane.

Do you remember when Texas first rolled out that law that put a near-total ban on abortions and called it something inherently misleading like the “Heartbeat Bill?” That was just last year — we’re actually at the one-year mark since it was first passed in Texas. Time flies when you’re busy treating folks capable of birthing as if they don’t know what’s best for them and their health. 

But even before Texas and their fetal heartbeat bill, there were states bold enough to push the envelope on Roe v. Wade — states such as Alabama and Georgia in 2019. In 2018, West Virginia went so far as to amend their constitution, duly stating that, at least in West Virginia, there is no right to abortion. A riveting article in the Texas Tribune details how Texas’ path to their post-Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization reality was nearly two decades in the making; let’s not pretend like the Dobbs decision was out of left field or totally unexpected. 

In the case of abortion, the South has become somewhat of a crystal ball for the rest of the nation. Outlandish or incomprehensible laws from down there may make the news one day but fade into obscurity the next. After all, wasn’t that what happened when Texas passed their fetal heartbeat bill? Weren’t we all dismissive of it? I’m sure the thought in all of our minds was that the bill, and the state of abortion in Texas, would go nowhere. We were wrong. 

I fear that the willingness to brush off the seriousness of these anti-abortion bills in the past was, in many ways, due to the general idea people get whenever they think of a state that has banned abortion: probably red in the last election and somewhere in the South. It would make sense then for Democratic leaders and strategists to not even bother with building up any party or organizational structure in the South if they know it’ll be an uphill battle for them to gain votes in the next election. 

In writing off an entire region, even during campaign seasons, we’ve relegated its people to suffer the consequences of the decisions that a stark minority of their leaders are making. What’s more, we leave the South, the region with the highest percentage of Black Americans — who experience higher maternal mortality rates than any other racial group — to fend for themselves. 

We are utterly ill-equipped for and sluggishly reactionary to any sign of backsliding that comes from the South until it is too late. In doing so, we are putting the lives of Black, Indigenous and people of color in a heightened level of danger. 

I fear we may again be ignoring the signs of what might be lying ahead. Anti-choice advocates in Rhode Island have already petitioned the Supreme Court to hear a case that may outright ban abortion access nationwide. Will we ignore this sign too, and brush it off as too far-fetched to become a reality? I think we’ve thought the same about a whole range of things before — like when a certain real estate mogul was running for President — and look where that got us.

We have to start getting serious about outlandish news, bills or laws that we may be inclined to brush off. We have to start getting serious about the South, or we’ll eventually be scoffing all the way to some kind of dystopian future.

Quynh Anh Nguyen is a junior writing about the implications of current Southern political events in her column “I Reckon.”