TRESSIE McMILLAN COTTOM: Citizens No More
Friday, July 1, 2022 -- I grew up choosing where and how I work because Roe v. Wade gave me many of the same basic rights of personhood as men, for example. Millions of women have, to different degrees, been able to do the same. With Roe v. Wade toppled, we do not have the same rights in all labor markets. In a global market, an empowered worker is one who can migrate. With Dobbs, women cannot assume that we can safely work in Idaho the same way that we can in Oregon or Washington.
Posted — UpdatedRoe has been doctrine my entire life. When I graduated high school, the senior year photographs were included in a memory book. One of the pages invited us to imagine our careers and salary 10 years in the future. I predicted I would be a lawyer earning a very realistic $35,000 a year. I was not stupid. I knew that race and gender might make that much harder to achieve. It never occurred to me that I should temper my aspirations because I was a girl.
In one lifetime, Roe had pushed women so fully into the paid labor market that it was normal for high school seniors to be asked to answer a genderless prompt about their economic aspirations. Flipping through that book today feels like reading a fairy tale, the old Grimms’ ones and not the new Disney ones.
I grew up choosing where and how I work because Roe v. Wade gave me many of the same basic rights of personhood as men, for example. Millions of women have, to different degrees, been able to do the same.
With Roe v. Wade toppled, we do not have the same rights in all labor markets. In a global market, an empowered worker is one who can migrate. With Dobbs, women cannot assume that we can safely work in Idaho the same way that we can in Oregon or Washington. I cannot negotiate wages or time off with an employer with the same risk profile as those who cannot become pregnant. An employer who offers lower pay in a state with abortion care indirectly benefits from women’s inability to take our labor on the open market across the nation. Thanks to a rogue court, women’s lives are now more determined by the accidents of our birth than they were a week ago.
The majority opinion in Dobbs argues that it is merely making the right to an abortion a state’s decision. In reality, the justices are making it a corporation’s privilege. A society cannot be held together when half of a population has to rely so heavily on the kindness of strangers to do something as basic as work.
Today we pay a greater price for that freedom than do men. And it is a price that our children will inherit. Many of the people who celebrate the Dobbs decision are nostalgic for a pre-World War II American economy. That economy kept women from competing with men in the paid labor market. It also relied on unions to protect working-class men’s incomes. That economy is gone. This economy will not magically provide good jobs and good wages for men who will pass that on to their wives and children.
As a Black woman, I inherited the debts that white racism exacted upon the livelihoods of my grandparents and great-grandparents and their great-grandparents. I know well what that inheritance feels like. It makes your life poorer. It makes your communities poorer. And it dooms a society.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority decision. Journalist Stephanie Mencimer wrote in Mother Jones that it was always “going to be Alito” who would write the majority decision. Alito says that the court cannot be concerned with how its decisions affect people. Linda Greenhouse in The New York Times described the opinion as arrogant. I expect arrogance from a conservative court. It is more important to me that the decision is so bold.
This is a court unafraid of the electorate and unashamed of showing its hand. The emperor does not care that he wears no clothes. Nancy Pelosi reads a poem. President Joe Biden issued a tepid commitment to women’s rights. No one seems afraid of the people. That is the people’s fault.
The fight now shifts to the states, where many legal scholars do not know how to interpret this new reality. Some states are struggling with who has what authority. Other states want to refuse to enact Dobbs’ dictates but do not know how. We should be there to determine what a life after Roe v. Wade will look like. It will be hard. Setbacks are certain. But there is no other way forward and so many ways backward.
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