Being able to determine your own life, your own body, your own future – Americans saw that as their fundamental right.
Since the Supreme Court overturned the universal right to abortion, that security has been gone.
The judges handed over the decision on abortion rights to the states – in almost half there could now be restrictive regulations, in nine such are already in force after the verdict.
Alabama and Missouri, for example, ban abortion with no exceptions for rape and incest.
The warnings of civil rights activists were confirmed practically overnight: Doctors no longer offer abortions because regional governments like in Texas threaten jail sentences, and women fear the virtual coercion of having to give birth against their will.
The verdict will exacerbate social divisions, was widely heard, because the judges ruled against rules that a large majority of Americans, at least according to polls, believed to be correct.
The conflict over abortion is not just a culture war.
It is about social and political power.
The Supreme Court, staffed with conservative judges, served as levers for the Republicans' triumph that they had worked on for more than forty years.
The Republican Party has not always been so fixated on the topic.
as she is today.
So far, abortion in America has not been regulated by criminal law as it is in Germany - but now the states can change this.
It is crucial for understanding the current situation that the two judgments received, "Roe v.
Wade” from 1973 and “Planned Parenthood v.
Casey” in 1992, regulated abortion as a privacy right issue, which is not in the Constitution.
The question of the protection of life, which had to be weighed against this, was intended to be solved by previous case law by allowing the states to restrict the point in time at which a fetus was able to survive independently.
The now overturned "Roe" decision was based on other precedents: Referring to the legal certainty clause of the 14th amendment, the chief justices had declared in 1965 that married couples had the right to choose their own contraceptive use ("Griswold v. Connecticut ’) – they later extended this to unmarried people.
It's about the rights of the individual
The decisions that have now been overturned were therefore not about religiously motivated considerations at the beginning of life, but about the rights of the individual vis-à-vis the state - the 14th amendment was interpreted in the sense of a right to private decisions.
Therefore, opponents of the most recent judgment see it as a fundamental attack on civil liberties, even as the abolition of full citizenship for people who can become pregnant.