Left With No Choice: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Death and What That Means For Women’s Health Care
At 7:40 PM on Friday, September 18, I received a text from my friend: “RBG JUST DIED.” My heart sank. That couldn’t be true. I immediately checked Twitter, and my entire feed was flooded with tweets about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
As I continued to read through everyone’s tweets, the implications of what just happened began to set in. A seat on the Supreme Court is now open, and this country is still under Donald Trump’s presidency. Of the eight remaining justices on the court, only two are women, and only three overall were appointed by a Democratic president; the remaining five were appointed by Republicans. While Justice John Roberts is a conservative justice, he has become the swing vote, and at times he has sided with the four liberal justices. This past June, he was the key fifth vote in striking down a Louisiana anti-choice law. Without Justice Ginsburg, the swing vote would now pivot even further to the right.
My anxiety increased as more tweets filtered in.
Everyone started quoting Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s 2016 tweet when President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to succeed Justice Scalia. We were all hoping he would stay true to his word during this election year as well. However, he did not. Only hours after news of Ginsburg’s death broke, McConnell said, “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.” After receiving a significant amount of backlash, he tweeted three days later:
My heart sank further. I was worried for everyone in the country. For all women. For everyone who is not a straight, white male. All I could think about was if Trump succeeds in putting someone on the court, Roe v. Wade has a very high chance of getting overturned. There are already several states working in full force to implement anti-choice laws. However, with Roe v. Wade still in place, a woman’s right to bodily autonomy is protected by the Constitution. If women’s health rights are stripped away due to this reversal, it does not mean that abortions will stop; it means that more women will undergo dangerous procedures. Women’s bodies are continuously being regulated by conservative males in positions of power, and this will worsen with a Supreme Court that has six of its nine justices leaning to the right. McConnell’s decision to go back on his word felt like the final nail in the coffin. With the Senate currently majority-Republican, Trump will almost certainly get his nominee approved.
In addition to anti-choice stances, a more conservative Supreme Court will find more ways to limit access to contraception. I thought back to the Supreme Court upholding the Trump administration’s regulation that permits private employers with religious or moral objectives to opt-out of insurance coverage for contraceptives without having to provide an alternative. This was already a huge blow to reproductive rights, but without Justice Ginsburg, there will be more.
As a woman in her early twenties, the possibility that I won’t have access to birth control weighed heavily on my mind. The use of contraception is a right that all women deserve to have. I continued to scroll through Twitter. It was like a car crash, and I just couldn’t stop looking.
Did this mean I had to really consider getting long-term birth control? My roommate and I sat on our couch in disbelief. She was just as stressed as I was.
What will happen next?
My mind was on overdrive, trying to come up with plausible solutions. I’m still covered under my parents’ health insurance, but since they live in Massachusetts, all of my doctors are there too even though I live in Washington, DC. There’s no way I can get an IUD before the election. IUDs are also unpredictable. I’ve heard so many different takes on it; some people have had horrible reactions to it. I do not want to be stuck with a birth control that doesn’t suit my body. There wouldn’t even be enough time to test it out before November. I’m currently on the pill, which has worked well for me so far. Risking my mental and physical health didn’t seem appealing, but neither did a world where I would lose the freedom to choose contraception. I was genuinely contemplating moving to another country, but then the logistics of that would be difficult and unrealistic.
A week passed by, and Trump officially announced his nominee for Justice Ginsburg’s seat. Amy Coney Barrett. She is staunchly pro-life and has gone on record stating her inability to separate church and state. Barrett signed a statement in a 2006 newspaper advertisement that urged overturning Roe’s “barbaric legacy.”
Barrett being on the Supreme Court will be a major step back not just for women’s health care, but health care in general, LGBTQ+ rights, racial equality, and gun safety. Roe v. Wade, the Affordable Care Act, background checks on gun purchases, and more might all be gone. The Supreme Court will be able to vote conservatively on everything for several decades at least. The idea of Trump now having the opportunity to put his third justice on the court was disheartening and nauseating.
I am terrified for what may happen in the next few weeks, but we cannot stop fighting. This has felt like the longest year of my life, but it has lit a fire under everyone. We have to fight for justice, for equality, for human rights. If President Obama was not allowed to appoint someone after Justice Scalia died 9 months before the 2016 election, then President Trump has absolutely no right appointing someone less than two months before the 2020 election. Also, conservatives shouldn’t be holding hearings with 22 days until the election.
Fifty-six percent of voters recently said they prefer to have the election act as a referendum for the open seat. We need to use all of the tools at our disposal in order to delay these hearings, ideally until after Election Day. Then, we must maximize any political cost for conservatives should they decide to ram a nominee through in the lame duck. We cannot stop fighting.
