 Most of you who would have some idea about women's rights and women's movements in the US would know that abortion has been a major issue there because US has a large number of very conservative, strong Christian voices which oppose abortion of any kind at any stage They believe that a fetus once conceived is a living organism and it is a life They call it a potential human being or an unborn human being and they believe that women have no right to terminate those pregnancies at any point and it does not matter if the woman was raped and that was how the fetus was conceived It does not matter if it came out of incest It does not matter if the woman could probably die if they gave birth Though all those questions are set aside because it is believed that the human life inside the womb is in itself a life and when you terminate it you're essentially committing murder which they believe is therefore a sin Now about 50 years ago there was a landmark judgment called Roe vs Wade and many people would know about it That judgment essentially made it legal for women to go and get an abortion until the 28th week Week or 7 months Now what did that do? That essentially made it easier for women to access abortion because we know that even if you make abortion illegal there would be illegal clinics there would be midwives who would perform these abortions of fetuses and often this would lead to huge health hazards to pregnant women and what they did was that this got rid of large scale teenage unwanted pregnancies Pregnancies where women were forced to have children by abusive husbands Pregnancies caused by rape or sexual assault and that gave women the right and choice over their bodies It made it equal for women in workplaces in society in general They had the right to decide what they will happen to their body That as you know has been overturned by a recent US Supreme Court judgment I'm not going to go into the details of what it means for women's rights for feminists, for women in general in the conservative states which will immediately and some of them have already done it ban all kinds of abortion There are people who know better than me and they'll be able to give much more details I'm going to only look at certain signs that this brings here and the dangers of the language of democracy or populism because what is this judgment really saying? The judgment essentially overrules row and weight on legal grounds not on the ethical ground of whether a fetus is a living human being or not It says that row versus weight said that there's a constitutional right to privacy that women have and that constitutional right to privacy allows women to take a decision as to whether they're going to terminate their pregnancy or not as long as a fetus is not viable or does not become a viable human being and in row versus weight the court decided that is 28 weeks over a period of time scientific evidence has brought that down to about 22 weeks in some places or even 20 weeks as in India and in some parts of Europe but even then there have been cases where there could be delay in recognizing that there could be health hazards to the mother where with the consent of doctors the termination is allowed in some other countries Now what is the ground on which the Supreme Court is saying that row and weight has to be overturned They're basically saying that this judgment was faulty right from the beginning It was faulty right from the beginning because there is no constitutional right to abortion The constitution does not talk about abortion and American history and tradition and custom has not been taken into account to decide this judgment to come to this conclusion when the Supreme Court ruled in row versus weight and what is again the Supreme Court essentially saying now it is saying that it is not the court's place to make these decisions These decisions are to be left to individual states, their legislatures it's to be left to their law makers based on what people decide and those law makers will decide what is relevant for their state what is the history of the state, what are the customs of the state and what is the reasonable liberty that any human being can have including women Now very clearly the Supreme Court's decision is in the name of democracy It is saying that the people must convince each other and through that convincing process whoever wins they elect representatives and the elected representatives then pass laws and it should be left to individual states and it says there is nothing in the constitution in fact the constitution does not uphold this It also says that there is no way, there is no scientific or any way for the state to decide at what point it's going to intervene to decide that this is a living being It said that Roe versus Wade had decided without any justification that 28 weeks is the issue New evidence shows that it could even be 12 weeks when the fetus has a certain kind of existence as a human being So what is it, it's arbitrary and therefore there is no line where the state can decide and even if the state decides it's not for the courts to decide as it says that the court, it was almost like a hammer of the Supreme Court to pass it across the board across all states and that is being removed and if now all 50 states decide to allow abortion then good, let them do it through their legislative process, through election, through voting This is the populist argument that is now emerging along with neoliberalism everywhere The people want it and therefore we should have it If the people want a Christian nation, a Hindu nation then that is what we have to have There can't be any abstract liberal humanist values any longer that have to be upheld The Supreme Court argues that there is no connection between abortion and contraception and same-sex marriage The US Supreme Court and it says that it's only abortion which actually ends a life But who says, what if we say that sperm itself or an ovum itself are forms of life Then contraception has to be banned What if we say that when a woman decides to have a child even when doctors say that if you try to have this child you are going to die Is the doctor committing murder? Is it the doctor assisting suicide? That is the question the court does not answer Why is it that pregnancy which could come to term in which a woman dies in childbirth is okay and the court does not stop it because why is that not considered suicide? So these are clear precedents that have been said and there is a reason to believe this There is a reason to believe that there is a deep state that has operated and operates in all neoliberal regimes now and they are increasingly uniting the capitalist class with conservative right-wing elements to suppress democracy in the name of democracy They are doing it by saying this is the people's voice We saw what happened during Donald Trump's regime What Donald Trump successfully did was that he appointed 3 conservative judges to the Supreme Court and that has been the turning point by Roe vs Wade which was considered to be almost written in stone Never to be questioned has been overturned and it is important that Justice Alito who has written this particular judgment in 1985 according to the New York Times report when he was giving an opinion to the Reagan administration on imposing restrictions on abortion There were 2 cases in which there were demands for restricting abortion and the Reagan administration, Republican administration, a conservative administration wanted to side on the way of anti-abortionists and it is interesting that Justice Alito at that time a law officer a lawyer in the Justice Department just 35 years old had said that go slowly The sense of what he had said was that go slowly we have to gradually nip at Roe vs Wade slowly cut it down till the Supreme Court is ready to overturn it and that is what has happened After 50 years there is a conservative majority in the Supreme Court by which justices have overturned something that had given huge rights to women and that overnight is going to take away those rights in the land of the so-called free in the so-called land of the free in the so-called land of democracy women's rights are being snatched away from them in the name of a few cells Why? Because of religious conservatives who believe that abortion is the same That's the show today Keep watching, news click Subscribe to our channel Like this video, share it as well