This is not a good way to keep your friends. The Supreme Court’s historic end to nationwide abortion rights yesterday drew unusual criticism from some of America’s closest allies and bucks a global trend to more liberal reproductive rights. The decision came one day after the Supreme Court also struck down some of the modest restrictions on guns – an issue that, along with the US embrace of the death penalty, has long shocked other Western nations. Here’s what you need to know.
According to reports, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the Supreme Court decision will have “massive impacts” worldwide. “I think it’s a big step backwards. I’ve always believed in a woman’s right to choose and I stick to that view, and that’s why the UK has the laws that it does,” Johnson said.
World Leaders Slam The U.S. Supreme Court’s Decision To Overturn Roe vs. Wade
Likewise, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denounced the decision across the border as horrific. “No government, politician, or man should tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her body,” Trudeau wrote on Twitter.
French President Emmanuel Macron voiced his “solidarity with women whose freedoms are today challenged” by the US Supreme Court, while Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde said that legal and safe abortion was a fundamental right.
“Depriving women of their individual rights is a backlash against decades of hard-fought work,” Linde said.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden himself deplored that the top court has “made the United States an outlier among developed nations in the world” as he vowed to keep up efforts to secure legal abortion. The president made his remarks on the eve of flying to a summit in Germany, which just yesterday repealed a Nazi-era law that limits the information that doctors and clinics can provide about abortion.
The Supreme Court voted in a 5-4 decision on Friday overturned Roe v. Wade. The court’s controversial but expected ruling gives individual states the power to set their own abortion laws without concern of running afoul of Roe, which had permitted abortions during the first two trimesters of pregnancy.
Among the few world leaders who may be heartened by the ruling is Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, an ally of former president Donald Trump and his own country’s evangelical Christians, who took to Twitter hours before the decision to denounce an abortion carried out on an 11-year-old girl who was pregnant as the result of rape.
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