Where were you when you heard Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died?
 | By Lauren Kelley Editorial board member |
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Where were you when you heard Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died? |
I realize I’m looking back with wispy nostalgia at an event that took place a week and a half ago. But that’s about 15 years in Trump Time. And even amid all the madness of this era, I think many of us will remember that moment for the rest of our lives. |
I was in a cabin on Fire Island, on an anniversary trip with my husband. We had just picked up a pizza for dinner when my phone started to buzz. “NO,” one friend’s text message read. “Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?” pleaded another. There were many expletives that I cannot repeat here. |
That moment felt really, really bad — and not just because I was spending a romantic getaway sitting on the floor next to a power outlet, fighting with a shaky Wi-Fi connection so I could work. (Sorry, babe.) It wasn’t even that we had lost an icon — someone I and so many others looked up to with such reverence. It was losing this enormously important person now. Something about R.B.G. almost, but not quite, holding on long enough to get the chance to be replaced by a Democrat felt maximally devastating. Instead, Donald Trump has the chance to put another hard-right justice in her seat, bringing us one huge step closer to, among other things, the unraveling of Roe v. Wade. |
I thought about that while reading Joan C. Williams’s Op-Ed today on the future of Roe. Ms. Williams, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings, rightly notes that in many ways the constitutional right to an abortion, as established by Roe in 1973, has been so chiseled away that it effectively doesn’t exist for many women in America today. What good is the right to an abortion if the laws in your state are so strict — and the number of clinics so small — that it’s all but impossible to get one? |
Ms. Williams is also right that reproductive rights supporters need to be thinking beyond Roe — brainstorming strategies for protecting bodily autonomy in a world in which Roe has been overturned or gutted beyond recognition. Because now that Mr. Trump has selected Amy Coney Barrett as R.B.G.’s likely replacement, that world is well within reach. |
I wouldn’t dare try to predict how so many things will unfold over the next year — let alone the next week. Will The Times’s revelations about Mr. Trump’s tax returns change the course of the election? If he loses, will he leave office willingly? If not, what then? |
Still, I think it would behoove all of us to start imagining an increasingly plausible scenario playing out next summer. It’s the end of Justice Barrett’s first term on the Supreme Court bench, and a bombshell abortion rights case is about to be decided. We’re nervously staring at SCOTUSblog waiting for the news to come down. And there it is. Our phones buzz. Expletives. Tears. |
Many of us will remember where we were when we heard the news for the rest of our lives. |
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