In measuring the progress of the West over the last decades, we always looked at the balance.

In this process, we found a measure of optimism. As many steps back that there may have been, leaps into the future were far greater.

These days, however, no leap appears sufficient for American women, as they are once again forced to fight for the self-evident – to choose if and when they will bring a child into the world.

The ruling of the US Supreme Court, in which three Trump appointees were in the six-member majority, turns the clock back 50 years for American women.

They now live in a country that does not recognise their right to determine what they do with their bodies, but instead treats them as machines for reproduction, without a will or a choice.

The ruling renders difficult their access to necessary services for their physical and psychological health, creates class inequalities between women who have the means to travel to another state that permits abortion and those who will seek other means not to forcibly become mothers, risking even their own lives.

With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the US is taking a huge step backwards. It is returning to a dark past, in which women were placed at the margin of history, as second-class citizens.

They are condemned to live worse than their mothers, and their wings are clipped, so that they can later be told they do not know how to fly.

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