SPRINGFIELD — “I’m feeling dismay, disgust. I’m not surprised but also emboldened and ready to take it to the next level.”
Donna Haghighat summed up her reaction Friday evening as she and between 80 and 100 people lined up in front of the federal courthouse on State Street to protest the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision declaring abortion access no longer a right protected by the Constitution.
The Springfield demonstration coincided with others in Northampton, Worcester, at the Statehouse in Boston and around the country that were organized in the hours after the Supreme Court decision was announced Friday morning.
The CEO of the Women’s Fund of Western Massachusetts, Haghighat said the first step women need to take is to make sure that women’s rights are respected in Massachusetts and access to abortions is available to all who need it.
“We need to get further and deeper into advocacy for reproductive justice in our state,” she said. “Black and brown women who are lower-income have the hardest time accessing care.”
Prache Sinha from South Hadley said that while the decision was not unexpected — the draft of the decision was leaking to the media weeks before Friday’s announcement — she said it is still deeply emotional.
“It is definitely a gut punch,” she said. “I don’t even know if I am angry anymore because I am just so exhausted.”
Jessica Dillard-Wright said the court decision had deep ramifications for her family. She and her wife are dreading Justice Clarence Thomas’ threatened attack on gay marriage and how the court could affect their daughters and two nonbinary children.
“It is hard to disentangle all of the potential implications of overturning Roe v. Wade,” Dillard-Wright said. “I think we see in the decision the direction they could be taking with Obergefell. I think this is very scary and has lots of potential health care and rights implications.”
Dillard-Wrights referred to the Supreme Court decision of 2015 that found same-sex marriage a right guaranteed by the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Mark Flanagan and his wife brought their 5- and 3-year-old daughters to the demonstration. He said having his young daughters there was important for both of them and for him as well.
“I don’t like the decision and we want to let everyone know it,” he said. “It means freedom for them, I mean the lack of freedom now. Amelia is 5 and she understands that this is about a person’s choice of what they do with their own body. She thinks that’s obvious.”
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