This great setback for women’s rights in the US is a call to arms

As we said when the draft United States Supreme Court ruling was leaked last month, the clock has been turned back in America. The striking down of Roe v Wade, the 1973 judgment guaranteeing a woman’s right to choose on abortion throughout the US, is a tragedy. It will lead to great suffering, especially among poorer women who will find it harder to travel to liberal states where their rights will be protected.

It is a retreat from progress towards the protection of fundamental human rights in America, and to the extent that such rights are universal, it diminishes us all. Not that we British should pretend to automatic moral superiority. The same clash between devolution and fundamental rights is being played out today in Northern Ireland, where a decision by the sovereign House of Commons of the United Kingdom that abortion services must be provided there has been blocked by Northern Ireland ministers.

In the US, the institutions are different, but the issues of principle are the same. The arguments that have raged over Roe v Wade for half a century now have been over states’ rights as much as over the rights of women over their bodies. The decision by the Supreme Court on Friday was notionally not about women’s rights at all, but about the right of states to decide such questions. Contrary to the ruling in Roe v Wade, the justices decided that, under the constitution, each state must decide its own law on abortion.

Yet of course this is not really a question of states’ rights: it is a political argument about values that has been driven by a religious movement exerting disproportionate electoral influence. The majority of the US population takes a balanced and pragmatic view of abortion: that it should be legal in most circumstances. In the US as elsewhere, the debate should be about what those circumstances should be, but in the US – and in Northern Ireland – that debate is skewed by the minority of people who believe that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances.

However, it is the reasonable attitudes of millions of Americans that will in the end, The Independent believes, mean that progress will resume before too long. Views on abortion have been relatively stable since the 1970s, in sharp contrast to those on, say, divorce, the death penalty and legalising cannabis, which have all become more liberal. But opinion polls suggest that opposition to abortion in all circumstances has been declining since the turn of the century. State legislators who want to ban abortions altogether will find themselves on the wrong side of their voters.

For too long, defenders of abortion rights have lacked the will to fight. Roe v Wade has been under threat for so long that it is only now that it has gone that a renewed sense of urgency and purpose can be rediscovered. Suddenly, it is the supporters of a woman’s right to choose who are more energised than the religious campaigners who have won a terrible victory because they cared more.

We believe that this Supreme Court decision will be a call to arms and a renewed campaign, state by state if need be, to win back women’s rights. The deep conservatism of the US constitution will make progress difficult, but in the end the will of the people will make itself felt. The clock of progress will turn forwards again.