The anti-abortion argument that tempted even British politicians

Any British Conservative who thinks they are being clever by invoking states’ rights on abortion probably doesn’t know their history, and certainly hasn’t thought about the future, argues Holly Baxter

Abortion-rights activists rally at the Indiana Statehouse (AP)

When Roe v Wade, the ruling that made abortion federally legal for women in the United States, was overturned a few weeks ago by a newly ultra-conservative Supreme Court, I wasn’t surprised. Political reporters had told me to expect the decision for weeks. What I was surprised by, naively, was the British response. I had assumed that the country of my birth would be uniformly horrified by this Gilead-esque striking down of women’s rights. I thought that even Conservative MPs – barring perhaps Jacob Rees-Mogg – might want to posture about how enlightened they are in comparison with Supreme Court justices like the Clarence Thomases of this world.

For the most part, of course, British politicians did sing from this hymn sheet. But some did not. Conservative MP Danny Kruger – whose mother, Prue Leith, has spoken about having an illegal abortion when she couldn’t access one legally – stood up in parliament to say that women don’t have the “absolute right to bodily autonomy” and shouldn’t expect to. “I don’t understand why we are lecturing the United States on a judgment to return the power of decision over this political question to the states, to democratic decision-makers, rather than leaving it in the hands of the courts,” he said.

Kruger was echoing the well-worn “states’ rights” argument that bad-faith conservatives in the US often like to use. We’re not banning abortion or seeking to ban gay marriage, goes the argument; we’re just returning the decisions to the states themselves. Somehow – despite gerrymandering and a system that assigns a disproportionate number of representatives to sparsely populated, rural areas over densely populated, urban ones – that’s “more democratic”. What’s the problem with that, eh?

This argument has been used throughout American history in order to oppress numerous populations, and was most famously deployed in defence of slavery. Even the least interested reader of American history will know that allowing some states to legalise enslavement and others to opt out didn’t last very long. It also led to a variety of horrifying practices, such as paid “slave-catchers” who travelled along state lines to try and traffic Black people out of the states where they lived freely and into states where they could be sold as property.

Despite the fact that the US is one country, the “states’ rights” argument has rumbled on since then. Last weekend, Ted Cruz said that he thought Obergefell v Hodges – the ruling that made same-sex marriage legal – should also be overturned and its decision returned to the states. Clarence Thomas has floated the idea that the same could be done with contraception and laws that make gay sex legal. At the point at which people are being denied contraception, arrested for having sex, and – as is happening already – denied their life-saving lupus medication because a side effect of the pill includes miscarriage if the taker is pregnant, one might wonder whether someone in a red state is really living in America anymore. When Red America becomes a Christo-fascist dystopia and blue America is the same forward-looking US we all remember from the Barack Obama years, how can the country ever hope to be reconciled?

One wonders, too, where the “states’ rights” argument stops. If the aim is to create countries within countries, why not devolve all laws to the states? What makes fraud or murder or copyright infringement so special, after all? And what happens when a “states’ rights” law potentially contradicts a federal law? In the case of Idaho’s new abortion law – which makes no exception for abortions to save the life of the mother – what happens when a bleeding, dying woman is condemned to death by a doctor in the name of trying to save (or simply “not touching”) a foetus? What if her family takes action against that doctor, arguing that he should face charges for manslaughter? Will the Supreme Court end up ruling that under US law, killing a woman is different to killing a man?

Any British Conservative who thinks he’s being clever by invoking states’ rights probably doesn’t know his history, and certainly hasn’t thought about the future. But what is terrifying is that world-changing decisions are being made by such men now – and, in the case of the US Supreme Court, will be for decades in the future.