Overturning Roe v. Wade Is Scary And Not Just For Women
Turning back the clock is a trend with far-reaching consequences and not just for one particular group of people in one particular country — it is crucial for all to take note and take a stand.
Of course, women and girls in the United States of America are — rightfully so — worried now that the current U.S. Supreme Court will likely overturn the ruling of Roe versus Wade. Politico revealed a leaked draft majority opinion that states that the 1973 landmark decision in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction will be overturned — probably as soon as June 2022, almost fifty years after the initial ruling. This would be a major setback for women’s rights in the United States. But not only that — it is one of the many signals that authoritarian forces in societies worldwide are rearing their ugly heads to turn back the clock on what were assumed to be acquired rights.
I’ve often wondered how the knowledge and societal constructions of the classics — the Greeks and the Romans — could have been forgotten — or at the very least ignored — by subsequent generations. How could people knowingly and willingly give up their acquired rights and slip back into subservient roles in society? Medieval Europe was a far less desirable place and time if you valued freedom of choice than were the previous ages — we don’t call them the Dark Ages for nothing, after all.
British historian Donald Cardwell stated that every society — when left on its own — will be technologically creative for only short periods. Sooner or later conservative forces take over and manage to slow down and even stop technological creativity altogether.
I posit that Cardwell’s Law not only applies to technology but also to societal progression. Societies will only be progressive for relatively short periods of time — a couple of hundred years at the most. This aligns with what political psychologist Karen Stenner calls the Authoritarian Dynamic.
In her 2005 investigation into authoritarian personality types, Stenner concluded that about one-third of any group of people has a predisposition towards authoritarianism — meaning that they prefer order, conformity, oneness, and sameness over diversity, complexity, and ambiguity.
She warned that when changes towards diversity and pluralism start to feel more and more threatening to authoritarians they will be activated into extreme intolerance. In a democracy, authoritarians could use the system to overhaul itself. If you vote to have your freedoms taken away, that will happen in a democracy if you reach a certain threshold. Once that has happened, there is no easy turning back. The struggle to obtain rights has proven to be arduous and seemingly endless — just ask any minority anywhere on the planet.
To discard what others have toiled and even died for is not only ungrateful, it is more than likely detrimental.
The struggle to regain lost freedoms will — hopefully — be won again; hence the Dynamic part of Stenner’s research: Freedom comes and recedes like the tides, over time.
Since the news about the overturning of Roe v. Wade surfaced there have been opulous public discussions about what supposedly acquired rights could be next on the chopping block of the U.S. Supreme Court — same-sex marriage, gay sex, contraceptives, or even a return of anti-miscegenation laws (that enforce racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships). If the authoritarian forces in the U.S. manage to turn back the clock on these and other supposedly acquired rights, they are certainly not alone. Elsewhere in the world freedom is at stake in both places you’d expect it to be — like Afghanistan — and in places where you’d least expect it to be — like western Europe.
The overwhelming and rash return of the Taliban in Afghanistan caught many people by surprise, but perhaps it shouldn’t have. On the one hand, you’d expect the Afghans to be happy to have gotten rid of the Taliban and their super strict oppressive rules. But on the other hand, we didn’t see a very stable and coherent Afghanistan once the Taliban no longer ruled. In accordance with the idea of the Authoritarian Dynamic, one can imagine a large proportion of the Afghan population having been fed up with the chaos and ambiguity — resulting in much (silent) support for a return to clarity and order, no matter how devastating the results for women and girls who crave individual freedom.
During the last French elections, freedom-loving Europeans sighed with relief that center-right Macron won over far-right Le Pen. The opposite result could have been an enormous catalyst for the success of the extreme right in western Europe — with all its dire consequences for the freedoms Europeans have grown accustomed to since the Second World War. In Eastern European Poland and Hungary, people are already getting a taste of what that means in daily life. The Polish right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party of prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki has a close ally in Hungary’s far-right Fidesz party of prime minister Viktor Orbán when it comes to pushing down on minorities’ rights. Women, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants have seen their freedoms either taken away or pushed back — if not by law then certainly by the atmosphere created by the right-wing governments in their countries. Many did not see this coming; who would have expected the Polish and Hungarians to give up on the freedoms they gained after the fall of the Soviet Union?
The now likely loss of Roe v. Wade in the U.S. is another piece of writing on the wall that shows the worldwide tide of freedom is receding. To have this ominous shrinking of human rights happen in what is supposed to be the beacon of the free world should scare any freedom-loving individual anywhere on the planet — woman or man.
