The divisive legacy left by donald trump manifests itself once again with the draft majority opinion written by Samuel Alito, one of the conservative magistrates of the Supreme Court of the United States, who cancels the recognition of the right to abortion at the federal level and leaves it to each state to legislate on the matter. Put into practice, it will mean that all states with a majority of the Republican Party will have the possibility of explicitly prohibiting abortion or will not find obstacles in the courts to continue doing it covertly with provisions such as the one approved by the Texas legislature.
The draft, known thanks to the unusual leak to the media of a text on which the Supreme Court is working, reflects the conservative majority of six magistrates out of nine, secured by Trump during his tenure through the extremely controversial appointment of three judges ideologically close to him. Something that completely changed the balance in the Supreme Court, politicized its composition as never before and questioned the independence of criteria of those appointed to be part of the institution without external influences. The final decision of the magistrates will become a fundamental part of the campaign of the November legislative electionswhich has probably just started out loud.
And while all of this is transcendent, the irreparable damage that the final decision of the magistrates can inflict on the Women rights in the United States, which the same Supreme Court enshrined in 1973 and reiterated in 1992. There is a certain risk that women’s freedom, their autonomy as citizens with the right to decide on their own bodies, will be limited or altered to the highest degree, based on an unacceptable double argument: that the United States Constitution does not include the right to abortion and that such right “is not deeply rooted in the history and tradition of the nation.” All of which implies subjecting women to a protected regime insofar as it concerns the administration of its body and hinders the defense and protection of freedoms that were not textually collected by the drafters of the Constitution in the eighteenth century or incorporated later in the form of a constitutional amendment.
The 98 pages written by Judge Alito are written outside the messages that the street emits, from the polls that indicate that the majority supports the right to abortion to the influence of feminism as an enormous transforming power of society. It is against this transformation that the draft attacks in addition to consecrating inequality. But if the laws suppressing the right to abortion are approved, it will be because at least in some states there may be a majority, if not social, then electoral, that supports them. And this is another legacy, even deeper than the arithmetic of the Supreme Court, not only from the Trump era but from years of undermining work from ultraconservative positions.
Seen from Europe, in what the magistrates decide there will be an inspiring factor for the extreme right, traditional opponent of abortion, of same-sex marriages and of the regulation of euthanasia, all of them fields that can be included in the so-called body politics to which ultra thought has always opposed with the support of religious fundamentalisms similar to those that proliferate in the United States. Hence the risk of contagion.