It’s coming down. Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

Roe v. Wade is dead. I’ve written that sentence so many times, for so many years, that it barely registers. I’ve been mourning the loss for half a decade. I’m used to mourning now. Still, looking at the actual decision — written by Samuel Alito, leaked to Politico last night — it’s clear that the death of Roe is going to be darker than I had envisioned.

We are not going back to the way things were before legal abortion. We are going somewhere much worse.

After Roe is overturned, abortion will become illegal in all or most circumstances in 21 states. The “right to privacy” on which Roe hinges was established in an earlier case,Griswold v. Connecticut, which established the right to contraception; Alito specifically names Griswold as a faulty ruling, and it will almost certainly be overturned as well, making birth control illegal. This might not immediately inspire panic — why not just go to a safe state to get your abortion or your IUD? — but the states that pass abortion bans will also pass travel bans. If you leave home pregnant and come back otherwise, that itself will be illegal.

There is no cavalry coming over the hill, no Hail Mary play, no impending wave of pro-choice activism that’s going to save us. There simply are not enough pro-choice justices on SCOTUS to save abortion. The American news media never liked covering abortion. Democratic and “progressive” elected officials from Nancy Pelosi to Bernie Sanders made it clear they didn’t give a shit about abortion. The American public stopped caring about the GOP attacks on abortion many years ago.

For there to be a massive feminist uprising in defense of Roe, there would need to be a functional feminist movement in the United States. There isn’t one. Since approximately 2016, a misogynist backlash has almost completely dismantled it. Most feminist publications have been shuttered. The pandemic created a spike in violence against women and forced millions of women, particularly mothers, out of work and back into the home, triggering a generational reset on gender roles. #MeToo happened, and #MeToo foundered: Several GOP political candidates have histories of domestic violence and sexual assault — it no longer shocks the voting public or disqualifies the politicians in question — and two wealthy men, Johnny Depp and Marilyn Manson, are suing women with credible and much-documented abuse allegations for defamation. Neither woman initially named her abuser, so, if successful, the cases would make it a crime for a woman to publicly identify as a survivor at all, whether or not charges are brought against her abuser.

Roe v. Wade is dead, and no-one is coming to save it, and it’s going to hurt a lot more if you get your hopes up. So take a moment, steady yourself, and look at the other rulings Alito specifically cites as faulty and worthy of being overturned:

Griswold also formed the basis of Obergefell v. Hodges (the right to marry someone of the same gender) and Lawrence v. Texas (the right to have queer sex, ever, at all, without being criminalized). If there is no “right to privacy” and no sovereign right to control one’s healthcare decisions, then bans on HRT and gender-affirming surgery for adults are within the realm of realistic possibility; anti-trans advocates like Abigail Shrier have been obsessively framing transmasculine transitions in particular as attacks on the “fertility” of “young women,” and anti-choice legislation will likely sharpen the attacks on transition care across the board.

We need to make these connections now, because our enemies are already making them. Alito is overturning Roe, not just on the basis that the decision was faulty, but because any “unenumerated right” — that is to say, a right that can be safely assumed on the basis of the Constitution, but which is not specifically named within it — must be “grounded in U.S. history and tradition” in order to be valid. Gay marriage, gay sex, youth transition, any transition, interracial marriage, domestic partnership without marriage, abortion. contraception, or simply not being forcibly sterilized and/or detransitioned by the state — none of this is safe. None of this is “traditional.” All of it is on the line.

Roe v. Wade is dead, and this is not the end of one sad story. It’s the beginning of a far worse one. We’re not going backward. We’re going forward into a future where nothing is certain or secure. I do not know what the answer is, I do not know how to fight this, I cannot give you any promises that things will work out in the end. This is the end, and we need to fight, now, because we are fighting for our lives.