The Supreme Court of the United States annulled the ruling of 725 than for almost 50 years has served as a national guarantee for access to abortion .
The court’s conservative judges did so based on the Dobbs vs. the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which focuses on a Mississippi law that prohibito abortion after weeks of pregnancy, including in cases of rape or incest.
Under the direction of Lynn Fitch, the Mississippi Attorney General, that state asked the Supreme Court to uphold the law and strike down the historic Roe vs. Wade decision, which the court did this Friday.
Fitch -who has declined to be interviewed-, has argued that annulling Roe v. Wade is to “change the game” and “uplift” women by eliminating what he described as a false choice between family and career.
“Fifty years ago if you were a professional woman they wanted you to You will make a decision (between continuing to be a professional or a mother). Now you don’t have to,” she said on the pro-life program Pro-Life Weekly. “You have the option in life to really achieve your dreams, your goals and also have those beautiful children.”
But defenders of the right to decide have warned that some 40 millions of women will lose access to abortion and that the decision makes Fitch a single mother who has three children, in a republican superstar and models his own argument: modern women don’t need abortion to have it all.
From state treasurer to attorney general
Abortion doesn’t it was always a major issue in Fitch’s political career. When she first assumed public office, as Mississippi State Treasurer, in 2011, promoted legislation that guaranteed that men and women received the same salary.
His convictions were shaped by his upbringing and, especially, by his experiences as a single mother, says Hayes Dent, a longtime friend and colleague who ran her first political campaign.
When Dent met Fitch, she had just been appointed director executive of the Mississippi State Personnel Board – a state agency – by then Governor Haley Barbour. Dent was immediately impressed.
“Having been around every major political figure in Mississippi for 000 years ago, I realized he was going to run for office,” Dent said. “And that when h will start the starting trigger, it will haveday success”.
It was not until after a couple of years she did it, when she launched the campaign to be state treasurer.
When she started that first campaign, in 2011, “she was not the favorite,” says Austin Barbour, Republican national strategist (no relationship with former Governor Barbour).
Dent, who had been following Fitch, approached her and asked her to join to his campaign.
“I told him: ‘CI think you can win this race’”, he recalled.
She accepted and the two carried out an ambitious campaign. They would drive around the state all day making lots of stops at different places and, at the same time, in the hours that were free, they would make fundraising calls.
“His attitude was ‘what’s our job,’” Dent said. “And I was like, ‘We have to go to the tobacco spitting festival.’ And she did great! It didn’t spit tobacco, but it was cool”.
The only reason why Fitch rejectswas to participate ina campaign event was for her children. He left early if he had to attend a basketball game or a parent-teacher talk.
Kuklux Klan Leader’s House
She was a natural activist, but the fundraiser was delayed, so Dent askedl father of Fitch a personal donation.
Bill Fitch, the now attorney general’s father, still lived in Holly Springs, the small rural town near the northern tip of the state where Lynn spent most of her childhood.
Their father had inherited land on the historic Plantation Galena and used the extensive property of 8, acres (more than 3,200 hectares) to restore the family farm and turned it into a premier quail hunting destination. The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Mississippi Governors Haley Barbour and Phil Bryant became frequent guests.
Those staying at Fitch Farms can choose to Stay at the former home of Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was a Confederate General and the first great wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Mr. Fitch purchased the property and transported it to his hunting compound.
Lynn Fitch She has referred on several occasions in local media to the “special” memories of her childhood on her father’s farm, where she rode horses and hunted quail.
When she was a teenager, she was the “typical popular kid,” Dent said. “Leader, cheerleader, athletica, very complete“, he said.
He went to the University of Mississippi, joined a sorority of women and graduated in business administration and then in law.
When Hayes Dent drove to Fitch’s father’s farm to convince him to donate to the campaign, he said: “Sif I go from to whati with a big check, she goes to gain”.
She won and did it again four years later, securing a second term as state treasurer.
In this position she focused or on state debt, expanded access to financial education in the state, and advocated equal pay laws(Mississippi remains the only state that does not guarantee equal pay for the same job between men and women).
I support Trump
In that time, he developed his knack for connecting with voters, drawing on both his Holly Springs upbringing and an apparent ease of being in the public eye.
In interviews and campaign videos, Fitch appears naturally balanced and ready. He makes eye contact easily, speaks slowly and relaxed, often thanking God and his family for the opportunity to serve his state.
“Rural roots are important to voters in this state,” said Barbour, the Republican strategist. “And she is very endearing, she just is.”
Lynn Fitch also bolstered her conservative credentials with her endorsement of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. Precisely, lled the Mississippi Women for Trump coalition in 2011 and, when Trump was in Jackson for a campaign rally, she sat in the front row.
Two years later, Fitch announced that he would run for the position of f iscal ggeneral of Mississippi, a position that had never been held by a woman.
Achieved the victory in November 2019 with almost the 60 % of the votes, with the promise of defending “conservative values and principles” .
As a devout Republican in a state s A solidly Republican, Fitch’s position on abortion was taken for granted, even if he didn’t advocate it outright.
Across the country, around the 50% of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to data from the Pew Research Center. But among Mississippi Republicans, almost the 50% believe that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.
The Mississippi state legislature passed an abortion ban in 2018, two years before Fitch took over as prosecutor general. The law, which prohibits abortions after 15 weeks, was immediately challenged in court on behalf of the Women’s Health Organization of Jackson, Mississippi’s last abortion clinic.
A federal district court struck down the ban, saying it was unconstitutional . In 2011 confirmed it a higher court.
But in June 2020, Five months after taking office, Attorney General Fitch petitioned the Court US Supreme Court to review the ban on 24 weeks. The court, with its conservative majority, accepted and heard the case in December of last year.
Now, Lynn Fitch is known nationally as the lawyer who ended Roe vs. Wade.
“Empowerment” of women
At times, Fitch has said that his state is simply making an argument for the rule of law: asking the Supreme Court to turn abortion policymaking over to the states. But he also says quite often that this case is about women’s empowerment.
Roe vs. Wade, she said, made women believe they had to choose: family or career, not both.
“The court in Roe pitted women against their children and women against women,” she wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post.
The election is misleading and paternalistic, argued Fitch. It is a position seemingly drawn from her own life: a single mother who has risen to the highest levels in state government while remaining devoted to her children and grandchildren.
“Being a single mother has dominated her thought process and life experience”, said Dent. “I think that’s one of the reasons why they feel you so hard with this”.
In a world without Roe vs. Wade, Fitch said during a television interview last year, “babies will be saved” and mothers “will have a chance to really turn their lives around. They have all these new and different opportunities that they didn’t have before 50 years”.
Choice activists have accusedFitch of using feminist language to whitewash a policy inherently anti-feminist.
Their arguments rest “largely on false claims that they are ’empowering women,’” said Dina Montemarano, director of research for NARAL Pro -Choice America. This tactic, Montemarano said, is often used by anti-abortion activists to assert control over women’s bodies and violate their fundamental freedoms.
In a brief submitted to the Supreme Court, Fitch wrote of “widespread advances in policy (that) now promote women being able to pursue both a professional career and a family”.
In a counterargument presented before the Supreme Court, 145 economists warned in a letter that this optimism was “ premature and false”.
“The celebration of parental leave policies in Mississippi is particularly strange, since that the United States is one of only two countries without a national paid maternity leave policy,” the economists wrote.
Specifically, Mississippi ndoes not have state laws that and require paid family leave. It is the poorest state in the nation and has the highest rates of infant mortality and child poverty.
But with the repeal of Roe vs. Wade, Fitch returns to Mississippi as a conservative hero.
“Am 99% sure she will run for attorney general again,” Dent said. “And based on how the last three years have gone, it’s hard for me to imagine that she will have any Republican opponents this time around.”
There are also rumors that might one day run for governor. She has not yet commented on this speculation.
If she were to win, Fitch would be the first female governor in the history of Mississippi.
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