How victims of the Flint water crisis helped protect abortion rights in Michigan | Opinion

Ten years ago, the life of every Flint resident took a perilous turn when the city, under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager, began using the Flint River as its municipal water source.

Along with all the well-documented suffering, hardship and trauma we’ve experienced because of that fateful decision, there have been positive ripple effects we could never have foreseen flowing from our long and relentless fight for safe, affordable water.

Those include protecting abortion rights for all Michiganders, and enabling victims of an unemployment benefits debacle to sue the state, and collect. Both of which I knew nothing about until last week, when I joined a panel discussion to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the water crisis hosted by one of Flint’s most steadfast allies, the ACLU of Michigan.

Flint water crisis lawsuit created legal precedent

In 2016, I became the lead plaintiff in Mays v. Snyder, a lawsuit I and others brought against the state and some individuals in an attempt to gain some compensation for all the harm done to Flint residents.

But there was a huge obstacle we had to clear: Because of governmental immunity laws and the vast protection they provide, the odds were stacked against us being able to get a judge’s OK to even proceed with the case.

Fortunately, our legal team had two constitutional law experts – Julie Hurwitz and the late Bill Goodman – who devised an innovative approach that relied on “due process right to bodily integrity” in the Michigan constitution to overcome claims of governmental immunity.

We prevailed because the courts rightly saw that the city pumping poisoned water into our homes denied Flint residents that fundamental right. Allowed to move forward, the case recently settled for more than $620 million, with 80% going to children who were harmed. But the "bodily integrity" ruling so crucial to our case, I learned, has had much broader impact.

(Unfortunately, the U.S. Department of Justice has, so far, continued to ignore the constitutional violations the EPA also was responsible for perpetuating. Instead, government lawyers are clinging to an ongoing claim of governmental immunity in the class action lawsuit we filed against the EPA.)

Court ruling aided Michigan abortion rights fight

I was happy to join the ACLU’s panel discussion. The ACLU came to our assistance when few were listening to the claims that something was terribly wrong with our water, and they’ve been fighting alongside us ever since.

As the discussion wrapped up, we mused about how difficult it can be to predict the ripple effect success can bring.

When we conducted the largest citizen-led study of tap water ever undertaken, we had no idea that effort would result in the issue of lead contamination receiving worldwide attention and igniting far-flung efforts to address the hazard, with lead pipe replacement programs going on in cities and schools across the nation.

A fellow panelist, ACLU of Michigan Deputy Legal Director Bonsitu Kitaba, told me something I’d been completely unaware of. She described how the decision in Mays v. Snyder played a pivotal role in the ACLU’s successful efforts to protect abortion rights in Michigan.

Kitaba explained that the ruling in our 2016 case was the first to affirm bodily autonomy as a right under the state constitution. Fast forward to 2022, when the ACLU of Michigan and Planned Parenthood of Michigan sued the state over its archaic 1931 abortion ban law. That lawsuit’s aim was to preserve the state constitutional right to abortion before the U.S. Supreme Court imminent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The case was before the Michigan Court of Claims, where Judge Elizabeth Gleicher, using the reasoning in the Mays decision, found that the Michigan Constitution protected the right to abortion through the right to bodily integrity. That allowed the judge to issue a permanent injunction forbidding the state from enforcing Michigan's 1931 abortion ban and preserving access to this critical health care in Michigan after Roe fell.

I sat there, speechless. As a woman, reproductive rights are especially near and dear to my heart. To hear that our struggle helped protect those rights was overwhelming. Making it reverberate even more was the fact that the city’s use of the Flint River had, in a way, deprived many people who wanted to have children from doing so — as the Detroit Free Press previously reported, lead in the water had a significant negative impact on pregnancies:

“Fertility rates decreased by 12% among Flint women, and fetal death rates increased by 58%, after April 2014, according to research by assistant professors and health economists David Slusky at Kansas University and Daniel Grossman at West Virginia University.”

Anyone can join the fight for justice

So yes, Kitaba’s news blew me away. Then, another ACLU attorney pointed out that a written opinion by the former Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court in our case was also successfully used in another hugely important class action against the state.

In Bauserman v. Unemployment Insurance Agency, the thousands of people wrongfully accused of unemployment fraud and denied unemployment insurance tried to sue the state because of its use of a flawed computer system. The state’s attorneys tried to argue that people were not even entitled to sue the State of Michigan to get compensation for wrongs like this. Lawyers at the ACLU and elsewhere relied on the chief justice’s opinion in our case to convince the Supreme Court to say — for the first time ever — that in most cases, Michiganders can sue their own government for compensation when the government violates rights guaranteed to them by the Michigan constitution.

Clearly, the impact of our efforts has indeed been, happily, far-reaching.

But what is the lesson in all this?

For me, it’s that you don’t have to be an expert to engage in the fight for social and economic justice. I knew little about water treatment, constitutional law or how to be an organizer before the disaster hit. I was a working mom who educated myself, then began educating and organizing others in an effort to right a terrible wrong.

You can do the same.

Flint resident and activist Melissa Mays is founder of the group Water You Fighting For and Flint Rising operations manager. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters and we may publish it online or in print.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Flint's water crisis case set precedent for abortion rights protection