Supreme Court decimates women’s rights in Roe decision
Equal Rights Amendment will save women’s lives
The ERA-NC Alliance and its partners are outraged that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, allowing states to determine that most fundamental human right of bodily autonomy. Roe has always been the floor, not the ceiling, for a woman’s right to control her body, decide the size of her family and determine her future.
Removing this final federal protection of minimal abortion access will be devastating for millions of Americans, not just women. Every abortion restriction chips away or outright eradicates that basic human right — whether or not to bear a child. And we know with this decision that 26 states are set to restrict or ban abortion through trigger laws and other legislation. (See Guttmacher Institute.)
Therefore, publication and enforcement of the Equal Rights Amendment is literally a matter of life and death for women in America. Without the legal equality guaranteed by the 28th Amendment, hostile legislators will continue to not only overturn reproductive rights, but gut other laws that have brought women the current degree of equality we have. That is why in May the Alliance filed a brief in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, demanding that the Supreme Court use the ERA as the basis for its Roe decision. The court did not respond.
Justice Samuel Alito had the audacity to write that “no one, as far as we are aware, argues that the laws they enacted against abortion in the early 19th century …violated a fundamental right.” Women had no fundamental rights in the early 19th century, not even a vote.
Women have been denied autonomy over their bodies, indeed their own lives, for centuries. It has only been in the last 50-plus years that women have been able to serve on juries, get credit, apply for and get most jobs, earn a living wage and control when and if they have children. And that has been due, in part, to Roe v. Wade.
As the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “The argument … whether or not to bear a child … is something central to a woman’s life, to her dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. And when the government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a full adult human responsible for her own choices.”
Our founding mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment knew 100 years ago that women must have full constitutional equality because of unequal and unjust laws that impact mothers and potential mothers.
Abortion is the battle. Equality of rights is the war.
Signed,
ERA-NC Alliance
League of Women Voters of North Carolina
American Association of University Women NC
North Carolina National Organization for Women (NOW)
Business & Professional Women NC
WomenNC
Ratify ERA-NC
Charlotte Women’s Movement
YWCA of Asheville
Women’s Forum of North Carolina
NC Women United
Women AdvaNCe
Take action! The ERA-NC Alliance urges everyone to immediately ask Christopher Schroeder, left, the newly appointed Assistant Attorney General overseeing the Office of Legal Counsel, to rescind the 2020 memo to the National Archivist. That memo, sent during U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr’s tenure, effectively stopped National Archivist David Ferriero from publishing the Equal Rights Amendment as the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The ERA met all constitutional requirements when Virginia became the 38th and final state needed to ratify on January 27, 2020.