ATLANTA — In Georgia, abortion is an issue that has galvanized both major political parties – Democrats and Republicans, in opposite directions – and will likely continue however the Supreme Court rules.
"Why would they overturn Roe v. Wade and not give women complete control over their bodies?" Satara Chubb asked, as she passed through Georgia State University's campus Tuesday, on the heels of the Politico report indicating the Supreme Court was poised to overturn the landmark abortion case.
"I feel like the woman should have the final say so with her body, just because it’s a process that the woman goes through for nine months," GSU student Zalika Stradford added.
"You cannot ban abortion. You can only ban safe abortion," GSU student Tanjanae Walker said.
However, at the State Capitol, pro-life Republicans have passed anti-abortion bills on mostly party-line votes. As then-president Donald Trump appointed three conservatives to the Supreme Court, Georgia lawmakers like Ed Setzler became hopeful it would overturn Roe v. Wade.
"I think after five decades of this ugliness, this brutality, this coarsening of our culture, I think folks realize its time for (Roe) to be on the scrapheap of legal history, and the court seems to be on the brink of doing that," Setzler said, who wrote Georgia's 2019 "heartbeat bill."
Setzler thinks Roe v. Wade will end up in the same scrapheap as some 19th-century supreme court decisions. He cited the Dred Scott case, which kept legal slavery; and Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation.
"Fifty years of brutality of Roe v. Wade that literally allowed (fetal) children to be thrown away with medical waste. It's sickening what’s been happening," Setzler said.
The question is whether lawmakers like Setzler would use the opportunity to tighten even further state laws that are now written to ostensibly recognize abortion as a right – a right that would go away if Roe v. Wade is overturned.