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Voices & Opinion

POV: How the End of Roe v. Wade Will Impact My Life

Two School of Law students reflect on SCOTUS decision and what it means for their future

Last month, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that granted a constitutional right to abortion in the United States. The Court’s 6-3 ruling June 24 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization upheld a Mississippi law that banned abortions “if the probable gestational age of the unborn human” was determined to be more than 15 weeks and overruled Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that upheld Roe.

In this op-ed, two School of Law students—Zaneta Soumbounou (LAW’24), vice president, and Shannon Gonick (LAW’24), president, of the BU chapter of If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice, offer their personal reflections on what the overturning of Roe v. Wade means to them. The student organization If/When/How seeks to educate, organize, and support law students interested in learning more about reproductive justice, with a goal of ensuring that new generations of lawyers are prepared to successfully defend, define, and expand the scope of the reproductive rights space. The organization also seeks, in its own words, to “transform the law and policy landscape through advocacy, support, and organizing so all people have to the power to determine if, when, and how to define, create, and sustain families with dignity and to actualize sexual and reproductive well-being on their own terms.”

“As a Black femme, I have never felt secure in my right to bodily autonomy, and now what little control I do have has been endangered.”
Zaneta Soumbounou (LAW’24)

I think I should say this up front: I have not had an abortion. This isn’t to flex some kind of moral superiority, but rather to avoid speaking over those who have direct personal experiences with abortion and to contextualize my perspective. That said, like most Americans (whether or not they’re aware of it), I know many people who have had abortions and I love them deeply. I would go to war to defend their choice, knowing they would do the same for me in a heartbeat.

Some other things to know about me: much of my political ideology has been informed by my Jewish faith and identity as a Black, Queer, nonbinary femme. I am a proud New Yorker and prouder still knowing that my city and state have explicitly supported abortion access for women, trans, and gender nonconforming people in light of Dobbs.

The leaked Dobbs draft opinion was published as I was finishing my first year of law school, panicking as I studied for my property law exam. While it pulled my focus away from the Rule Against Perpetuities, the decision did not shock me. If anything, it confirmed my concerns about the turning tides in American political ideology.

The Supreme Court’s decision to not only overturn Roe and Casey, but also to undermine rights founded in substantive due process will undoubtedly affect my life in the future. As a Black femme, I have never felt secure in my right to bodily autonomy, and now what little control I do have has been endangered. I am unlikely to move to most of the South and Midwest for fear that if I ever were to need an abortion, I would not be able to access one in time. I am anxiously awaiting the day the Supreme Court decides to review its decisions in Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, and Obergefell v. Hodges. Will they overturn any of them? All of them? Will Justice Clarence Thomas’ pompous concurrence in Dobbs, with all of its smug citations to his past opinions, become the basis for stripping away my right to choose who I love and when I want to have children? What other hard-fought rights will end up on the chopping block?

I have never thought that America was perfect, or even an especially good place as far as political progress goes. Still, since Dobbs, I have struggled to maintain a sense of optimism in the face of an already challenging journey towards a legal career. I have devoted my (admittedly relatively short life) to making the world a better place for people like me, people like my younger siblings. I never want them to be put in a position where their right to choose is stolen by the zealous dictates of legislators and judges.

I’m not sure what’s next, but I know we all need to brace ourselves for the next battle and the fight of a lifetime.

“Losing the constitutional right to abortion feels utterly dehumanizing. …I am so damn angry.”
Shannon Gonick (LAW’24)

Despite the imminence of Roe and Casey being overturned, and the knowledge that they were never enough to begin with, I continue to mourn the revocation of the constitutional right to abortion.

As a young woman raised by a mother who had experienced divorce and built her own thriving business, I quickly appreciated the importance of independence and self-determination. I took to heart my mother’s insistence to never find myself reliant upon a partner. Abortion access means so much to me because I critically rely on it, despite the inability of Justice Samuel Alito and the rest of the Dobbs majority to grasp this simple concept. I don’t know if I’ll ever want children, and I certainly don’t want any now, so I rely on the assurance that I could get an abortion if I ever needed one to enable me to live the life I want to live.

Overturning the right to abortion tells people who can become pregnant, including many women, that they are not entrusted to make their own decisions; that they cannot control what happens to their own bodies and their own lives; that their desires and talents and prospects, nurtured for years or decades, have less value than the potential for another life. Losing the constitutional right to abortion feels utterly dehumanizing.

I incidentally gained a deeper understanding of the myriad reasons people get abortions during my time volunteering with an abortion fund: not only for self-determination, but also to ensure they feel ready and able to provide for a child, if or when they have one; to preserve their capacity to parent the children they already have; and sometimes, just to survive. Because I know there is no monolithic abortion story, I dread knowing that the Dobbs decision is going to tear across the enormity of the human experience.

Because of this, I am indescribably angry. Angry that five people can make poorly reasoned decisions that are so astronomically out of touch with modern cultural values and popular opinion. Frustrated with the veneration of a flawed and biased approach to interpreting a document cobbled together hundreds of years ago—when people owned other people as chattel through an enshrined racial caste system, womanhood was pitied if not disdained, and queer people could not safely exist. Furious at the women who have been chomping at the bit to spearhead their own oppression, mostly white women who hold their whiteness tight and desperately beg for any scraps of power that white supremacy hints it will offer. I am so damn angry.

Nonetheless, I can’t fully discuss my feelings about the Dobbs decision without acknowledging that I do not hold identities that have always been subjected to reproductive injustice in the United States, including abortion restrictions as well as forced sterilization, genocide, and coercive contraception prescribing practices. Many communities have been living in a post-Roe reality for a long time: rights without remedies aren’t really rights, so the right to abortion doesn’t mean much if you can’t actually get an abortion. As a white, upper-middle-class cisgender woman who has lived only in cities and states that protect abortion access, my capacity for understanding and empathy can never match the lived experience of reproductive subjugation. Even after Dobbs, I anticipate that I will continue living in states that secure abortion rights; if I ever need an abortion, I will likely have the resources to afford it.

Most acutely, I simply feel overwhelmed. Despite the fact that decades of political organizing and judicial strategizing led to this moment, it feels like floodgates have burst open and I’m suddenly drowning in a deluge. The post-Roe “to-do list” can feel daunting: destigmatizing abortion, which will empower people to better advocate for it; spreading the word that emergency contraception is not abortion, and highlighting how abortion restrictions and criminalization endanger people who have ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages, stillbirths, and other adverse pregnancy outcomes; figuring out how to make sure people can get abortions regardless of where they live in the polarized, state-by-state scheme that’s currently materializing; preparing to fight against the prospect of a national abortion ban that is on the political horizon; and reforming or otherwise shaking up state and federal judiciaries to allow for meaningful advances in reproductive rights. While we gear up for these challenges, we know that Dobbs set off a substantive due process domino effect that implicates other privacy rights, like contraception and LGBTQ+ rights.

Despite it all, I take deep solace in the fact that the reproductive justice movement has been preparing for this moment. Specifically, Black women and the movement they created know best how to work toward reproductive freedom. Abortion funds, which provide low-income patients with the financial support to pay for their procedures, have seen a sharp increase in donations since the Dobbs decision. We can and should support the groups that have experience navigating barren abortion landscapes, but also remind us that reproductive justice goes far beyond access to abortion and contraception.

Mourn for as long as you need, but let your anger fuel you. We all have work to do.

Zaneta Soumbounou (LAW’24) can be reached at zaneta@bu.edu. Shannon Gonick (LAW’24) can be reached at gonicksa@bu.edu. The BU Law chapter of If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice can be reached at ifwhenhow.bu@gmail.com.