‘In Jewish tradition, the woman’s needs are central to the moral equation’

DAN COLEMAN: All three Jewish Supreme Court justices since Roe v Wade were pro-choice. As RBG declared, 'the decision is central to a woman’s wellbeing and dignity'

WHEN I LEARNED last week of the US Supreme Court’s impending ruling to overturn the landmark abortion rights decision Roe v Wade, my thoughts turned first to former Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She must be rolling in her grave, I thought.

After all, it was Ginsburg’s untimely death during the final months of the Trump administration that opened the door for right-wing, anti-choice zealot Amy Coney Barrett to ascend to the court, locking in the fifth vote needed for this long-sought far-right goal.

In writing this column, I must start with an acknowledgment that I am cis male, someone who could never face pregnancy let alone the need for an abortion. But I also write as someone who could not condone returning to a society in which women are second-class citizens. Reproductive freedom may be a matter of human rights, but, when abortion is banned, it is women, especially poor women, who will bear the brunt.

And the burden on women in American red states should not be underestimated: education and careers cut short, teenage girls forced to bear the children of rapists or family members, women losing their lives through back-alley abortions or life-threatening pregnancies. And those who obtain illegal abortions could wind up in prison. Already, a bill classifying abortion as homicide is moving through the Louisiana state legislature.

Yet it is women who are erased from Justice Samuel Alito’s draft ruling, which was leaked last week to great uproar (“an astonishing breach of norms,” said Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus). Alito does not mention the conclusion joined by three Republican appointed justices in 1992 that women’s control of their reproduction is essential for them to “participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation”.