Letter from ATD Fourth World USA’s National Leadership Team after the Overturning of Roe v. Wade.

The individual and collective consequences of the overturn of Roe v. Wade will impact many of us. In ATD Fourth World, our work is to understand these consequences through the lens of people with the experience of poverty. We four on the national leadership team want to share our viewpoint on this politicized and controversial topic, while acknowledging that we all have a lot to learn, together and from one another, about the impacts on families experiencing poverty. 

The impact will surely be different depending on one's socio-economic status. This ruling means the end of safe abortions in many states. People with means have more access to family planning options and are more able to find ways to get a safe abortion when members of marginalized communities cannot. Further, people with means may also be more able to assure a healthy pregnancy and birth and raise a child they did not plan to have, often with less judgment, less risk, and more support. Families living in poverty, on the other hand, struggle to raise their children as they wish to, have little real support from institutions, and often have to fight just to keep the family together.

The change in constitutional rights made by the Supreme Court goes deep in unveiling the way our society is working. This ruling shows how our social structure and the institutions that support it are built around two intertwined yet opposing social dynamics: On one hand, the more privileged people are, the more privilege they have access to. On the other hand, the more that marginalized people lose control over their lives, the more they are pushed into poverty. Precarities and poverty reinforce each other in the same way that privilege reinforces privilege. 

With this decision by the Supreme Court, our way of functioning as a society, built more and more on these opposing dynamics, intrudes even more intimately into the lives of people and families.

This ruling is shaped in part by the gender power structure at play in our social structure. As an organization, we have a lot to learn about the relationship between patriarchy and poverty, and how dismantling one is linked to dismantling the other. This learning must be done, of course, with people with first-hand experience of poverty as the foundation and at the lead. 

This is ongoing learning, but for now, what we know is that we stand with people experiencing poverty around the country who want to have more control over their lives, including the entire trajectory of their family life. We stand together for their health, their rights and the choices they make for their families. And we stand against any type of legal decision that, despite claiming that we are all equal in front of the law, feeds division and polarization by profoundly impacting some of us more than others.

In solidarity,

Guillaume, Karen, Maria, and Virginie
ATD Fourth World National Team