Joe Biden once again denounced the Supreme Court’s “terrible and extreme” decision on Friday
“We are going on the offensive”: several major American progressive organizations have called for the fight for the absolute right to abortion, annulled last week by the Supreme Court, to be continued through the ballot boxes and courts of the country.
According to the forecasts of these organizations, abortion has already been made “inaccessible or almost inaccessible” in a dozen American states since the decision of the Supreme Court last Friday.
Across the country, “women are waking up pregnant in states where abortion has been banned and do not know what to do,” denounced Alexis McGill Johnson, president of the main American family planning organization, Planned Parenthood.
The pro-abortion legal counter-offensive thus quickly took off, on the basis of complaints filed in state courts. “We don’t just defend ourselves, we go on the attack,” assured the director of the powerful association for the defense of civil rights ACLU, Anthony Romero.
Legal proceedings to challenge the bans of certain American states and to defend the right to abortion are underway in at least 11 American states, from Oklahoma to West Virginia, via Utah, Kentucky and Idaho.
In Louisiana, a clinic and medical students, for example, attacked the three laws prohibiting abortions, arguing that they are too “vague” since they do not clearly specify the exceptions or the associated penalties.
A judge on Monday blocked those laws until a July 8 hearing.
“Expect to see more complaints soon,” said Nancy Northup, head of the Center for Reproductive Rights.
This legal guerrilla should delay the deadline for the application of the new laws, but, according to the Guttmacher Institute, half of the States, especially in the south and the center conservative and religious, should in the more or less long term ban abortions on their ground.
These groups also called to mobilize for the midterm elections in November, during which the Americans will determine the composition of Congress and will decide on a series of local polls, sometimes decisive for the future of the right to abortion.
US President Joe Biden once again denounced Friday the “terrible and extreme” decision of the Supreme Court which “will turn lives upside down” according to him.
The Democratic leader urged Americans to go to the polls in November to bolster his majority in the Senate, to try to pass a federal law protecting the right to abortion.
