Why Roe Matters
By The choice quote (pun intended) from today’s NY Times essay by a doctor who provided post-abortion complication treatment before Roe v. Wade:
What Roe said was that ending a pregnancy could be carried out by medical personnel, in a medically accepted setting, thus conferring on women, finally, the full rights of first-class citizens — and freeing their doctors to treat them as such.
The language of the piece seems to me an interesting reworking of Justice Blackmun’s language in the Roe decision itself. The decision focused so heavily on doctors, only cursorily and even peripherally mentioning the women whose rights hung in the balance. In this essay, Dr. Fielding, now in his 80s, inverts that language. It is women’s equality rights that are front and center — and the right to abortion is crucial to them.
Worth reading in full