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An open letter from women of Class of ’72 on their classmate Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked reversal of Roe v. Wade

PSRJ Protest Sign
Candace Do / The Daily Princetonian

The following is a guest contribution and reflects the authorsviews alone. For information on how to submit an article to the Opinion Section, click here. A version of this open letter was previously published in the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

We, the undersigned Princeton women of ’72, have been deeply shocked by the leaked Supreme Court draft authored by our classmate Justice Samuel Alito ’72.

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We are about to celebrate our 50th reunion — half a century since we graduated from Princeton. We find it bitter indeed to see the draft Supreme Court opinion reverse the strides we thought we were making, as part of one of the first classes of Princeton women, towards a world of equity and fairness for women of all races and social and economic positions. 

We ask our classmates, and the community of Princeton, to protest the logic that ties us to a constitutional originalism which resists any movement toward justice but, rather, moves us backwards. As Jill Lepore so aptly put it in The New Yorker, “Women are indeed missing from the Constitution. That’s a problem to remedy, not a precedent to honor.” 

Instead, we want to call attention to this urgent truth: We hang on a precipice, balanced between the draft opinion and the final Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade. The right to manage one's own health and most intimate personal and family decisions without outside interference is at risk right now and should be preserved to ensure social justice for ourselves, for our classmates, and for the world Princeton purports to serve.

Signed:

Women of 72

Susan M. Squier 

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Daryl English

Judith White

Joan Matthews

Helene Fromm

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Holly Lovejoy

Jacqueline Ariail

Claudia M. Tesoro

Barbara Julius

Alice Kelikian

Diana Foster

Meggan Moorhead 

Ann Sease Monoyios

Yaffa Ventura-Beck 

Anna Baird Chitty 

Vera Marcus

Helena Novakova

Angenette Duffy Meaney

Larissa Brown

Sherry Peltz Leiwant

Jerri Donovan

Carol Rahn

Barbara Geller

Mary Watkins

Susan Brownstone Eig

Ellen Moriece Rome

Mary Baldwin

Elizabeth Houghton

Friends of the women of 72:

Christine LaLonde Robinson ‘73

Mara Melum ‘73

Carol Obertubbesing ‘73

Macie Green Hall VanRensselaer ‘73

Beth N. Rom-Rymer, ‘73

Nancy Teaff ‘73