FFI Statement on Draft Roe v. Wade Opinion
The US justice system is rigged – intentionally rigged. It is stacked against women, stacked against minorities, and especially against women of color. You know it, and we know it.
FFI fights back against this rigged system, and we need your support to fight back on behalf of women, especially women of color, who will be hurt if Roe v. Wade is overturned.
The draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, which would undo 49 years of every American’s fundamental right to privacy, relies on a pathology which maintains the only rights worthy of protecting are “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.”
We are under no illusions about what Justice Alito means when he refers to the deep roots of the precious tree of liberty upon which he and other revanchist ideologues hang their regressive views:
This figurative tree has historically had roots deep enough to, quite literally, sustain the weight of mass lynchings in our country.
The paper ballots – only afforded to white male landowners at the time of our nation’s founding – come from its pulp.
And the very bench upon which Justice Alito sits, along with every bench, gavel, and jury box in America’s broken system of justice, is made from its lumber.
We share in the outrage springing from this draft opinion.
The Fair Fight Initiative was founded in 2018 to innovate a new way to tip the scales of justice that have been fundamentally out of balance since our nation’s founding: crowdsourcing fair hourly rates for experienced litigators, to remove the high risk of contingency fees, to sustain meaningful civil action and defend people in criminal cases against these stacked institutions.
To date, this effort has crowdfunded litigation on behalf of families whose loved ones have died under brutal conditions in our jails, victims of prosecutorial misconduct, and people wrongfully convicted on the basis of evidence gathered by racist, corrupt, and violent law enforcement officers; each case part and parcel of a system of justice that uses the most marginalized members of our society – people of color and low income – as inputs to feed their corrupt institutions and preserve the precious, deep roots of a system of oppression Justice Alito so covets.
Should this draft opinion become the law of the land, our courts, our corrections, and our cops will have yet another lever of injustice to wield against marginalized people: they will expand their efforts to back alleys, backroom clinics, and any other place where women exercise their reproductive right to control their own bodies. People of privilege will preserve their right to privacy as they have always done: Through mobility, influence, and high-dollar hourly-rate defense attorneys.
When the first woman is criminalized for seeking an abortion, the first friend or relative arrested for driving a woman to an appointment, and the first expectant mother prosecuted for the involuntary trauma of a miscarriage, we stand ready to tip the scales of justice in their favor.
And when Justice Alito and his cabal of ideologues, groomed meticulously for the purpose of overturning precedent in the Supreme Court of the United States, decide that who you love, who you marry, or how you prevent a pregnancy is also not deeply rooted in their grotesque view of history and tradition, we will be ready to litigate on these victims’ behalf, too.
We stand in solidarity with the providers, organizers, and policymakers ready to wield their own expertise in different arenas to right this impending wrong.
Thank you for your support. We humbly ask you to contribute to this continuing effort.
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