Dear Highest Price, Dear Bear the Brunt & Double
Blow, Dear HeLa Cells Still Doubling, DearDisproportionately Impacted. Dear Anarcha
Without Anesthesia During Surgery with Sims.Dear Fannie and the Mississippi Appendectomies
with the Sick and Tired Ceaseless Sonnet Crown.Dear Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis. Dear Black
American Women Are 3 to 4 Times More Likely to Diein Childbirth Than White Women.

Everything seems to be falling apart. The Russians are occupying a neighboring state. A foreign crisis is causing spikes in the price of oil. Inflation is the worst it’s been in some 40 years. A Democratic president is facing the lowest approval ratings of his term and has openly admitted that he knows the public is in a foul mood. A virus is on the loose and making a lot of people sick.Even the music charts are a mess, a horrid stew of disco and wimp-rock hits.Wait.

The Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, allowing state governments to force women to give birth, is the result of decades of right-wing political advocacy, organizing, and electoral victory. It is also just the beginning of the Court’s mission to reshape all of American society according to conservative demands, without fear of public opposition.Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.I remember the days when my fellow conservatives hated activist judges and fulminated against attempts to gain in the courts what could not be won at the ballot box; today, a new kind of “conservative” is cheering a radical unraveling of women’s rights.

The entire legal and cultural ethos of the pro-life movement can be summed up in two sentences: A just society protects all life. A moral society values all life.Justice is thus necessary but not sufficient for a culture of life. The pro-life movement should greet the reversal of Roe v. Wade with a spirit of gratitude. The people of this country have, for the first time in almost 50 years, an opportunity to enact laws that truly protect the lives of unborn children.

Baz Luhrmann is a filmmaker who picks subjects as extravagant as the genre allows. When he made a teen romance, it was William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. His musical Moulin Rouge was scored with love songs from nearly every pop era. For a literary adaptation, he went with the totemic, supposedly unadaptable The Great Gatsby. He’s an Australian director who made a movie about Australia and literally called it Australia.

For months and even years I have seen this coming, and yet the reality of the Supreme Court’s decision is still a shock. How can it be that people had a constitutional right for nearly half a century, and now no more? How can it not matter that Americans consistently signaled that they did not want this to happen, and even so this has happened?The Court’s answer is that Roe is different.

This poem is a cento, consisting entirely of lines from other poems, compiled here in chorus. Some punctuation and tenses have been changed. I’m grateful to these poets for their lines, each attributed at the bottom of the page.Soon enough, the whole small
city of my being will demolish—
Without choice, no politics,
          no ethics lives.
I hold my grief like two limp
tulips.