Roe v. Wade would have turned 50 years old this week. Its legacy was always bound to be complicated—while it provided some theoretical baseline protections to abortion access, the reality was that after decades of judicial and legislative activism, some American women were a lot more free than others.
Still, as long as Roe survived, reproductive justice in America was a half-completed sandcastle built on a house of cards. Without it, it’s just a pile of dirt in a country for old men.
I have a 1-year-old daughter, and this year, I will turn 40. When all is said and done and my reproductive system decides it’s time to turn off the lights and hang a sign on the darkened front door thanking its loyal customers all for the business over the years, I will have lived in a country that legally treated any pregnancy of mine as something that should be subject to the superstitions of old men for less than a decade. My daughter’s life as a human-minus, officially, will be just about to begin.
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And so, in that spirit, I don’t want to spend the golden anniversary of Roe looking back. Let’s look ahead to the lives that have yet to be lived in this new reality. How will the next 50 years without Roe play out?
Demonstrators at a pro-choice march in 1989.
Cynthia Johnson/Cynthia Johnson/Getty ImagesI don’t believe that reproductive justice advocates will ever stop fighting for abortion care and access, nor will Americans—70 percent-plus of whom believe that what happens between a woman’s legs is not the government’s business—stand for it. In the months since the Dobbs decision, we’ve seen how voters in states nobody would expect—like Kansas, for example—have codified or clarified abortion access for their citizens.
Dobbs has also already backfired against the Republican party politically. Much like how a pregnancy puts a temporary and dramatic stop to a menstrual cycle, Dobbs reduced a much-hyped midterm Red Wave to some light red spotting, and now the House GOP is stuck with George Santos.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that anti-democracy moves by the GOP play out in a way that renders public opinion irrelevant. Let’s say that every effort by advocates fails, and in 50 years, we are a country with a nationwide abortion ban, limited access to contraception, and no improvements to the social safety net.
Many of the old men who paved the way for the legal unraveling of our daughters’ humanity will be dead in 50 years—and, honestly, thank goodness, because I fully plan on outliving these clowns. I’ve got my dancing shoes shined up and ready to tear it up on some graves. However, the creepy fixation on the reproductive organs of girls and young women will live on in the conservatives of the future.
There will be an epidemic of lonely old men.
Future old men will have had less sex than men in generations before, if they’re having sex at all. Fewer of them will be married. They will have fewer children. Because women will decide, finally, that heterosexual sex just doesn’t add enough to their quality of life to be worth the risk it introduces.
In the wake of the Roe decision, many observers pointed out that abortion bans don’t save babies, they kill women. I don’t want to make light of that reality, nor do I want to pretend that any woman who doesn’t want to give birth should simply abstain from sex. Many women still face cultural and social pressure to partner with a man, and many experience coercive sex within the context of their partnerships. Many women will still choose to have sex with men, because it’s fun and they like it. Not every woman has the power to opt out of sex, nor will they want to. But of those who can, many will.
House Democrats join an abortion rights protest in front of the U.S. Supreme Court Building on July 19, 2022 in Washington, DC.
Anna Moneymaker/Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesIt sounds hyperbolic, but it’s already happening. Young women across the country are already deciding in droves that having sex with men their age is not worth the trouble. This isn’t to be taken lightly—a healthy sex life can be an important component to overall mental and emotional health. But when it benefits one party at the expense of the other, can you blame the other party for opting out?
Adding more risk to the equation hardly makes it a more appealing option. Single, partnered, married, in some kind of bonkers FTX Bahamas penthouse orgy—it won’t matter. Every act of potentially procreative hetero sex will carry huge potential consequences for any women involved. (For the sake of brevity, when I say “sex for women,” I mean “heterosexual encounter that could cause a pregnancy” because upwards of 99 percent of potentially procreative sex occurs between “women” and “men.” Likewise, I use the term “old men” to refer to pro-life conservatives, because even though they do use women and young people as props in some photo opportunities, they, too, are mostly old men.)
If every act of sexual intercourse between a man and woman of reproductive age has a significant chance of producing a pregnancy that the woman would be legally required to carry to term, and if many health-care providers won’t even treat many serious pregnancy complications out of fear that they could be accused of performing an abortion and losing their license, that means that every act of procreative sex could lead to serious injury or even death. And that’s just the physical consequences.
(For those of you raising a single finger skyward in preparation of sending me a smug email suggesting that men would just pull out or wear condoms, let me preemptively respond:
No, they won’t.)
In this physical risk environment, abstaining from sex entirely would be a rational decision for many heterosexual women who either don’t want children or for whom pregnancy would pose serious health risks. This doesn’t mean that the country will be overrun with sad old cat ladies; given the fact that the happiest demographic are women who never married or had children and the least happy demographic are men who never married and did not have children, a world where women don’t want to be with men at all is a sad one… for men.
The conservatives who laid the groundwork for this future could have staved it off by making parenthood, and specifically motherhood, more financially appealing to more people. But they didn’t. They could have enacted a nationwide paid family leave program, but they didn’t. They could have invested in universal child care. They didn’t. They could have built a single-payer universal health-care system. They didn’t. They could have made certain colleges free, or helped ease the burden of student loans of people during their prime child-rearing years. They didn’t. They could have pushed for more affordable housing. They didn’t. They could have extended the child tax credit. They didn’t.
Instead, conservatives suggest that women who have children they can’t afford (thanks to conditions created by conservatives) or don’t want to raise should simply surrender their children for adoption. Anybody who believes that the act of putting a child up for adoption is not agonizing-to-traumatizing for the birth mother has never spoken to a woman who has given a child up for adoption.
Architects of our anti-choice present seem to truly believe that young women of the future, their autonomy thwarted by a legal landscape hostile to choice, will simply throw up their hands in surrender, run with open arms toward marriage at a young age, start birthing a Bible-reading brood, dutifully attend church and tell their husbands to vote Republican (because who needs the 19th Amendment when you’ve got a husband!).
If they die along the way, oh well, God’s will. The old men in charge believe reproductive freedom is the only thing standing between our current hellspape and the shining white Christian ethnostate on a hill our founders envisioned when they ratified the constitution drunk off their asses.
The more conservatives push to reach their wrinkly hands up the skirts of American women, the more they’re getting slapped away. This might mean that, eventually, stronger reproductive protections rise from the ashes of Roe. Or it might turn every heterosexual encounter into a potential pregnancy and every potential pregnancy into a potential grave injury, financial disaster, government-enforced trauma, and even death sentence.
For generations, America’s old men have taken active steps to make being a girl or woman of reproductive age as punishing as possible, like the enforcement arm of an old testament god still pissed about that whole snake in the garden thing. I can think of few policy blunders more catastrophic.
