'Reversing Roe'

While I’ve been familiar with the abortion debate, the documentary Reversing Roe gave me new insights into the political history of it. It is certainly interesting—and worrying—to learn that the Republican Party was, up until Reagan’s presidency, the pro-choice party. I’ve always found it ironic that the GOP is ideologically anti-government intervention, but it is worth noting that Ronald Reagan’s Moral Majority campaign, which appealed to the evangelical right, has played a fundamental part in today’s abortion discourse. As many of the arguments against abortion comes from a religious standpoint, the attempt to blend religiosity into legal institutions is fundamentally inconsistent with conservatism. This contradiction, of course, becomes even more obvious in the era of Trump. The U.S. president is evidently not a faithful Christian by any standard, and he seems to care little about evangelical causes. As the documentary shows, he himself once proclaimed that he was pro-choice. Yet like most Republicans in the post-Reagan GOP, Trump panders to his evangelical voter base as he has chosen Mike Pence his VP.

It is also interesting to observe that while pro-life advocates believe that they care about women’s rights, few women have been involved in this debate over history. The scene in the Texas state congress shows only a handful of female legislators, as white men were given the power to determine the livelihood of women, many of whom are people of color. A person who has never experienced pregnancy and will never do so explaining the reasons why a woman might go through an abortion is mansplaining at its worst.

In fact, the Roe v. Wade case encouraged me to rethink about the judiciary process in the United States. While the U.S. takes prides on its seemingly impartial judiciary system, the fact that the lives and health of women are determined by a possible 4-5 vote doesn’t seem to make much sense. When one partisan appointment can overturn a Supreme Court decision, changing the lives of millions, the flaw in the system should be apparent.