ARJ strongly condemns the leaked draft of May 2, 2022 containing the potential Dobbs opinion authored by Justice Alito. As a coalition of Harvard Law School students oriented towards reproductive justice, this massive step towards unfreedom in one of the most elemental reproductive rights heralds unacceptable restrictions on the bodies of people who can experience pregnancy.
To each of our communities, the first message we want to convey is that abortion is not yet illegal. It is still constitutionally protected and will be so until a formal opinion is released. It is crucial that pregnant people seeking essential healthcare know that it is still their right to access abortions.
Second, we can be sure that if this draft resembles the final shape of this opinion, it will open up our country to a wave of reproductive restriction that will actively harm the individuals and communities that are already most marginalized in our U.S. society. Rolling back the effort of movement activists, organizers, and litigators from over half a century ago, this potential opinion would trigger prohibitive restrictions in nearly half of the states.
Abortion would become even more of a racialized class privilege only accessible to certain pregnant people of means, who live in certain areas of the country. Reproductive justice draws together the need to protect the choices we have about our own bodies with the broad social necessity of caring for our communities and centering the needs of the most marginalized. What this draft suggests is the opposite: to strip abortion of any constitutional meaning not only runs against the inherent structure of our legal system, delegitimizing the Court and the canons of constitutional law, but moreover, runs against the vital moral imperatives of reproductive justice.
We know that this decision will most harm people of color, gender nonconforming folks, and lower income folks who can get pregnant. But women and gender marginalized folks from all walks of life across this country will see the conditions of their lives change.
We call for the Court to review its own canon of constitutional precedent and not to delegitimize the profession we ourselves have committed to.
We call on our legislators to advocate for state and federal statutes and constitutional amendments — laws that protect abortion but also actively protect pregnancy care, parenting support, sex education and contraception.
We call on folks in the movement to follow the lead of folks of color and lower income folks who are laying out their needs.
We call on each individual in our community to care for one another as draconian reproductive governance threatens to strip our most marginalized community members of basic rights and freedoms.