United States: trip to the past

America is about to turn back the clock 50 years.

If this summer its Supreme Court ends up repealing the federal right to abortion and letting each State legislate on the subject, we will have returned to 1972. It would be the West's biggest setback in half a century: the country that is sold as a benchmark of democracy renouncing a consolidated social advance.

Entire generations can change their lives.

Abortion has always been America's biggest culture war.

Few debates touch something so intimate and generate such fury.

The disheartening thing is that he was legally outmatched.

According to a survey by the

and the ABC network, today 54% of the population wants to leave things as they are and maintain the so-called Roe vs. Wade doctrine, the legislation in favor of abortion.

But one thing is the street and another, what the Supreme Court dictates.

The highest judicial body in the country has enormous power and its nine magistrates vote according to their ideology.

Today it is made up of five anti-abortion judges against three in favor of protecting women's choice and one moderate.

The ultra-conservative activism of the Supreme Court is Trump's legacy.

Before reaching the White House, he promised the radical right and evangelicals that he would do anything to make abortion illegal.

Already in power, he placed three anti-abortion judges on the High Court.

While defending guns and the death penalty, he cut off funding from organizations that helped terminate pregnancy, claiming they were against life.

But let's not fool ourselves: the ultra drift of the United States comes from before.

Radical Republicans have been trying since 1973 to ban abortion.

And they have done it in states like Texas.

I remember sinister characters like former congressman Todd Akin, who in 2012 said that “if it is a legitimate rape, the woman's body has ways of closing”.

That same year, presidential candidate Rick Santorum had the nerve to ask raped women to accept whatever God gave them.

These messages have been gaining screen share, weight in the networks and money for campaigns.

Now they have allies in the Supreme Court.

If the power to legislate on abortion returns to the 50 States, we will see a more disintegrated country, with radically different ways of understanding the citizen and their fundamental rights.

The most affected will be the usual ones: poor women in Republican states who cannot get on a plane to protect themselves elsewhere.

In addition, we cannot rule out that in the future some States will eliminate other acquired rights such as homosexual marriage.

It's sad and it's appalling.

The United States lets itself go in a drift that nobody understands.

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