Magnificent News: Today's WorldView: The Supreme Court turns the U.S. into a cautionary tale

Try four weeks FREE, then $4 every four weeks the next year

Read online

Developments from Ukraine, global analysis and top reads.

Presented by Twitter Blue

By Ishaan Tharoor
with Sammy Westfall

The Supreme Court turns the U.S. into a cautionary tale

An abortion rights demonstrator, dressed in a "Handmaid's Tale" costume, protests outside the Supreme Court in Washington on June 24. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

The American right loves to trumpet their nation's "exceptionalism," the myth that the United States' political system and values are inherently unique and implicitly better than anything found elsewhere in the world. But whatever the merits of the belief, the United States in recent years has been seen by its closest partners as exceptional for all the wrong reasons.

The Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol prompted myriad politicians in other advanced democracies to point to the relative health of their republics and the greater decorum and maturity of their transfers of power. The merciless toll of mass shootings in the United States reminds observers in places like Canada, Australia and Britain of the greater sanity of their nations' gun laws.

Content from Twitter Blue

Get premium features with a Twitter Blue subscription

Twitter Blue provides a better reading experience on and off Twitter—and includes a variety of premium features that let you customize your Twitter experience.

Try Twitter Blue

And Friday's decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade — scrapping the constitutional right to an abortion — led to a host of world leaders from across the political spectrum holding the United States up as a cautionary tale, a warning to the world of how fundamental rights can be lost.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a center-left politician, described the ruling as "horrific," tweeting that "no government, politician, or man should tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her body." Britain's right-wing Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the decision "clearly has massive impacts on people's thinking around the world" and called it a "big step backward."

French President Emmanuel Macron, a centrist, expressed his "solidarity" with those "whose liberties are being undermined by the Supreme Court." French lawmakers on Saturday proposed a law that would enshrine the right to an abortion in the French constitution.

"Nothing is impossible, and … the rights of women are always rights that are fragile and are regularly called into question," Aurore Bergé, who heads Macron's party in Parliament, told French radio, explaining that the U.S. Supreme Court's move motivated this legislative push. "I think we must not take any risk on the matter and therefore secure [the right to abortion] by inscribing it in our constitution."

On reproductive rights, the United States is now moving against the tide. "Over the past several decades, more than 50 countries have liberalized their abortion laws, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, a global advocacy group that supports abortion rights," my colleagues explained. "Only the United States, Poland and Nicaragua have reduced abortion access in the 21st century. Now many U.S. states are poised to enact much more restrictive laws than those in most other developed countries."

U.S. reproductive rights campaigners already are looking outside the country for sources of inspiration. "Across Latin America, feminist green wave organizers have sustained strategic campaigns — and won protections for these fundamental freedoms, despite intense opposition," Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, a leading social justice philanthropy organization, said in a statement. "We turn to their success as a roadmap for advocacy and a beacon for hope in the broader struggle for gender equality."

At home, rights activists see a darkening picture. The conservative majority's ruling overturning Roe, some worry, sets the stage for the possible further curtailing of other rights, including that of same-sex marriage as well as protections for racial and ethnic minorities.

"I think this is a perfect decision for the 18th century," Rosalie Abella, a visiting professor Harvard Law School who retired last summer from the Supreme Court of Canada, told the Globe and Mail on Friday. In her interview with the Canadian newspaper, the former justice likened the new ruling to other infamous Supreme Court verdicts that deprived Americans of fundamental rights — such as Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857, which said Americans of African descent could never become citizens.

"That to me is as inconceivable as what they did today," Abella said. "And yet they did it. It's a frightening precedent, and delegitimizes the integrity of a court."

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court is now in the spotlight. The court's weaponization by the American right is the end goal of decades of concerted effort and campaigning. "The conservative movement's control of the Supreme Court, its success in skewing the electoral process through voting restrictions and gerrymandering, and the Democrats' likely collapse in the coming midterms have bolstered Republicans' confidence that they can drastically reshape American society on their terms without losing power," wrote the Atlantic's Adam Serwer.

It is clear now, Serwer added, that "the Supreme Court has become an institution whose primary role is to force a right-wing vision of American society on the rest of the country."

In that regard, the United States finds itself in rather unflattering company. Analysts point to Poland, whose illiberal nationalist ruling party has spent years re-engineering the judiciary in its favor, much to the consternation of the European Union leadership in Brussels. Last year, Poland's Constitutional Tribunal issued a ruling that made abortion, or abetting an abortion, a criminal act, with exceptions only for rape, incest and to protect the mother's life.

Some Poles, like many Americans, saw its determination as an ideological act. "Many people in both countries perceive judicial institutions to be politicized," said Courtney Blackington, an American Fulbright scholar affiliated with the Polish Academy of Sciences and the University of Warsaw, to The Post's Retropolis blog. "When the new abortion ruling came out last year, there were activists who told me that they could not respect it because they felt it emanated from an institution that no longer respected the law."

In the emotional aftermath of Friday's Supreme Court ruling, countless Americans expressed similar feelings.

Developments from Ukraine

• A series of strikes hit Kyiv early Sunday, shattering a sense of relative calm since Russia's withdrawal from the capital in early April. The attack, which hit an apartment building and kindergarten playground, killed at least one person and injured several others, authorities say.

• President Biden and several of his counterparts in the Group of Seven nations announced a ban on new imports of Russian gold — and appeared to be moving toward consensus on a price cap on Russian gas — to further isolate the country from financial markets.

• The Russian military will soon exhaust its combat capabilities and be forced to bring its offensive in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region to a grinding halt, according to Western intelligence predictions and military experts.

• As German Chancellor Olaf Scholz hosts a meeting of the Group of Seven — his first major international summit — this weekend, he is a leader with something to prove, my colleagues write. "His first six months in office have come during perhaps the most tumultuous period in European history since World War II. And with it has come criticism that he is simply not up to the job."

1,000 Words

The Indigenous protesters of Ecuador have been credited in the past with bringing the country to its knees — and chasing three presidents from office.

Now, the South American country's powerful Indigenous movement has taken to the streets again, spearheading 12 days of nationwide protests that have paralyzed the capital and tested the government of Guillermo Lasso, one of the last conservative leaders on the continent, just a year into his presidency. (Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images)

Viewpoints

Europe's youngest democracy is a new front in the U.S.-Russia battle of ideas

By Jason Rezaian | The Washington Post ● Read more »

Latin America's lessons for a post-Roe United States

By Nara Milanich and Nayla Vacarezza | Foreign Affairs ● Read more »

From Pushkin to Putin: Russian literature's imperial ideology

By Volodymyr Yermolenko | Foreign Policy ● Read more »

Bloody retreat

A seriously injured soldier from the Ukrainian Airborne unit is evacuated after a Russian cluster bomb attack on Sunday. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)

OUTSIDE OF LYSYCHANSK, Ukraine — The Ukrainian Airborne unit was relieved to be pulling back from the front Sunday morning, riding a column of armored personnel carriers away from the embattled city of Severodonetsk, which had already fallen to the Russians, and Lysychansk, which was on the brink.

"Nothing happened to us to when we were at the front," the unit commander said. "It was while we were retreating that we got hit."

They were hit, and hit badly.

As the convoy moved into the farm village of Verkhniokamianske, with many of the soldiers riding on the outside of the vehicles, the first blast struck right by them. It was a cluster bomb, they would later surmise, something that tore through the contingent of men clinging to that side of one truck.

Several men were wounded, with blood pouring from limbs and, in one case, a soldier's head. But there was no time to treat them while the convoy remained in the crosshairs of Russian artillery. The uninjured applied tourniquets where they could, dragged the hurt back onto the vehicles and raced out of the village, across rutted farm lanes to a line of trees across a golden wheat field about a kilometer away.

It was just one of the many chaotic scenes that keep unfolding as Ukrainians give up ground to Russia's relentless push to control the eastern Donbas region.

Ukrainian soldiers lie exhausted after their unit was hit by Russian cluster bombs while pulling back from the front on June 26. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)

Some soldiers pushed their unit's vehicles into the tree cover, piling on branches to keep them hidden from drones used for targeting. The others did what they could for the injured, making do with their personal first aid supplies because they had become separated from the unit's big field medical kit.

There were eight men wounded, at least two of them seriously. The soldier with the head injury was drifting in and out of consciousness.

The commander had just radioed their location and requested medical evacuation teams when several Washington Post journalists covering the retreat came upon the group. The soldiers yelled for the journalists to get out of the area: "It's not safe!"

But The Post team's security escort, a former combat medic, had a well-equipped trauma kit in the car. "Come, come," the soldiers said.

While waiting for evacuation teams, two medics try to stanch bleeding and assess the severity of injuries. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)

For the next harrowing half-hour, the security escort worked with the unit's medic to stabilize the most serious cases. It was a purely humanitarian impulse, he would explain later. Combat medics are trained to treat the injured, no matter the flag on their uniform.

The convoy's medic removed the one man's helmet to show a heavy bandage. "He was hit in the head," he explained as a Ukrainian interpreter helped with communication. "But I don't find an exit wound. The shrapnel is still in there."

The pair administered IV fluids and considered the soldier's breathing, which was labored. A nasal tube was inserted and oxygen levels checked.

Nearby, another soldier was lying in a pool of his own blood on a canvas stretcher, his thigh heavily bandaged. — Steve Hendrix and Serhii Korolchuk