The following is a statement from A Better Balance Co-Founders and Co-Presidents Dina Bakst and Sherry Leiwant:
The Supreme Court’s decision today to overturn Roe. v. Wade is a sharp and devastating blow to the health, economic security, and autonomy of all women and birthing people. We rise in solidarity with our reproductive justice partners, who are prepared for this moment and committed to fighting for safe and accessible abortion. Make no mistake: this is an attack on women’s bodily integrity that strikes at the heart of what liberty is. Without a right to control one’s own body, a person has no rights at all.
Despite the Court’s cavalier citation of a case that said pregnancy discrimination was not discrimination against women, we do know better. We see it every day when our work-family legal helpline fields calls from women whose workplaces want to push them out using their pregnancy or the recent birth of their child as an excuse. As an organization committed to advancing reproductive justice, writ large, we are shocked at the Court’s characterization of our society and our laws as supportive of those who choose to have children. They are not. In 2022, America still has no national right to maternity leave, no right to sick time to care for a sick child, no right to pregnancy accommodations or prenatal health care. There is an ongoing maternal health crisis in this country, which falls heaviest on women of color, that we as a nation have ignored for far too long.
We all need to have the right to choose when and if to have a child, and to be supported by our society when we make either choice. We will continue to fight for that right, joining everyone in the civil rights and legal communities in fervently condemning this abuse of power by the Court to undermine justice and equality in our country.
