“Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?” – Joni Mitchell

It was 2016, and I was phone banking into Nevada for the presidential election. “Do you know if you’re planning on voting for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in November?” I asked the man who answered the phone.

“I think they’re both morons, but I’m a conservative and I want conservative judges so I’m voting for Trump!” he replied before slamming down the phone.

I had to admire his strategic clarity. If only those who support abortion rights were so fervent and clear-sighted! Now, after death by a thousand cuts whittled away access for decades, the right-wing Supreme Court seems poised to deliver the final blow, erasing 50 years of a constitutional right supported by a large majority of Americans.

But the Supreme Court was really lost in 2016, when Mitch McConnell got away with stealing an open seat from President Obama, liberals were not as motivated to vote as Nevada Guy was, Hillary Clinton lost in the electoral college, and RBG lost her gamble that she could outlive cancer and Donald Trump.

Now those of us who cherish the right to choose have lost even more.

Opponents of reproductive rights have fanatically pursued their agenda for decades. Alas, proponents have not matched their zeal–until now. SCOTUS’s expected evisceration of Roe v Wade is the wake-up call that’s finally mobilized millions of Americans who support the right to choose. There’s nothing like fear and anger to motivate voting.

No doubt the SCOTUS leaked draft will be tidied up before its official release. But it’s impossible to mask the stench of this radical decision, which threatens not only the right to control one’s own body, but so many other fundamental rights.

“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” Justice Sonia Sotomayer asked at the hearings for this case in December 2021. No.

It will take time to clear the air, regain the ground we have lost. But as Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson notes, “The only thing that can stop a bad politician with a vote is a good citizen with a vote.”