The zealots appear to have won. Goodbye Roe. Hello Jane Crow.
Women’s guaranteed access to safe, legal abortion across America may well soon be dead. Under a leaked draft published by Politico of the pending majority opinion in the Supreme Court case Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the watershed 1973 ruling that ensured constitutional protection for reproductive rights, Roe v Wade, would be eviscerated.
This decision does not turn on legal technicalities or minutiae. Instead it plunges a stake through the right to privacy established for decades under the 14th Amendment. Stare decisis be damned.
At the stroke of a pen, this Federalist Society cabal will reimpose 19th-century law in a 21st-century world. The instant its official opinion is handed down, trigger laws will prohibit abortion in nearly half of US states.
The leaked court judgment makes no exception for pregnancies caused by rape or incest. Remember all those women and girls raped by Russian soldiers in Ukraine? This Supreme Court would force them to give birth. Pure, unadulterated evil.
Its judgment won’t prevent abortions, but it will kill women. Experience proves this. Women will die from botched abortions in unsafe conditions. They will die from self-inflicted harm seeking to end unwanted pregnancies. They will die due to medical complications such as ectopic pregnancies, because doctors will be forbidden from administering essential treatments to save them. They will die by suicide, rather than bearing their rapist’s child. And some will be murdered by men unwilling to support them.
Women will also be punished and incarcerated after suffering miscarriages. Consider that. The horror shocks the conscience.
We know all this, because we have been here before.
The zealots don’t care. They parrot their pro-life mantra like a religious incantation. Because that’s all it is. Their counterfeit commitment to life ends at birth.
If they cared about ending abortions, they would mandate sex education, provide contraception on demand, and fund prenatal and delivery services. If they cared about helping women raise children, they would support ample paid family leave, affordable and accessible childcare, generous maternal and paediatric health coverage, and child tax credits.
They reject all this. The Republican Party opposes any measures that would actually help women.
This reactionary draft ruling runs counter to American and global progress. In recent years abortion has been made legal in country after country as people recognised that reproductive healthcare is a fundamental human right.
Over the past 30 years, more than 50 countries have eased restrictions on reproductive choice — nations as diverse as Chile, Iran, Brazil, Somalia, Cambodia, Kenya and South Korea. Catholic Ireland voted overwhelmingly in 2018 to repeal its abortion ban.
Only two countries during that period — El Salvador and Nicaragua — made abortion illegal. They joined a scattering of other countries including Honduras, Laos, Madagascar and Suriname in proscribing reproductive choice. Now the Supreme Court will add the US to this minority cohort.
And if you believe this edict affects only women, think again. Men are also in Republicans’ sights. Many will soon become reluctant dads. Child support and custody battles put a whole new spin on Netflix and chill. Talk about a Tinder buzzkill.
Nor will this stop at abortion. That 14th Amendment? It also protects access to contraception (Griswold v Connecticut, Eisenstadt v Baird, Carey v Population Services International), same-sex marriage (Obergefell v Hodges), interracial marriage (Loving v Virginia), and sexual freedom between consenting adults (Lawrence v Texas). Republicans are coming for these rights next.
This is not your grandparents’ Republican Party. Roe was decided by a 7-2 vote, all men, with five of those in favour nominated by Republican presidents. Justice Harry Blackmun, appointed by Richard Nixon, wrote the landmark opinion. A similar Republican majority also reaffirmed abortion access in the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v Casey. These were not radical jurists.
Ronald Reagan was for reproductive rights, before he was against them. So were George H W Bush and Mitt Romney. Senator Prescott Bush, scion of the family dynasty, helped found Planned Parenthood and served as its first treasurer.
At its core this seismic regression is profoundly undemocratic. GOP politicians ruthlessly exploited Senate rules and ignored constitutional obligations to block Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court bench, and then rammed through three judges chosen by his successor, a man who was rejected by a majority of voters. Twice. In so doing they weaponised the Supreme Court to deliver its fundamentalist political result. To hell with democracy and American voters.
Americans do not want this outcome. Women and men, young and old, in red states and blue, endorse abortion rights. Majorities of all races believe women should have the freedom to make their own decision.
Congress has the power to fix this. The House of Representatives has already approved the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would safeguard abortion rights nationwide. The Senate could pass it immediately for President Joe Biden’s assent — but for the filibuster. However, with senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema still in lockstep with every Republican senator to preserve that relic obstruction, minority rule will prevail again.
History will condemn the Roberts Court. It has torched its legitimacy. Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization will rank in ignominy alongside Dred Scott v Sandford and Plessy v Ferguson for its wanton cruelty and repression of individual liberty.
Now it’s up to American voters to roar their dissent at the ballot box. Maybe then Republicans will listen.
I find it quite remarkable that a large number of anti-vaccers, many of whom are men and right wing proclaimed that the state has no rights over (what I put in) my body, but see no inconsistency in rulings that tell women what they may and may not do with their bodies. For how many more decades will this rubbish contimue?
I believe there is such a case before the US Supreme Court right now.
So women can claim an unfettered right to bodily autonomy in regards to abortion, but when those same women apply the same bodily autonomy argument to vaccines (my body my choice) they somehow morph into ‘anti-vaxx’, right wing nut jobs?
The trouble with anti-vaxxers is that their choice affects the health of others.
So all those people attending ‘tripled vaxxed only’ events are contracting the virus from……?
Those unvaxxed people dying in far greater numbers than the vaxxed are contracting the virus from….? Not that I really care.
If only those women were the only ones affected by their choices. Unfortunately they pass serious illnesses on to others, who are probably of far more use to society than they are. If you can’t see the difference, well…I’m not in the least bit surprised. You people don’t really ever think, do you?
“Now it’s up to American voters to roar their dissent at the ballot box. Maybe then Republicans will listen.”
No they won’t. The ballot box is becoming no less quaint than abortion rights. The Republicans do not listen to or respect the results from voting, so they proclaim the Big Lie and say Trump won the last election. They have purged the party of any candidates with respect for the rule of law. They are clearing the voter rolls of anyone they suspect of voting Democrat because such votes are not legitimate. They are gerrymandering the boundaries to entrench their power. They are stacking the judiciary and the voter commissions with their creatures. If they do not regain Congress at the mid-terms they will be able to use the courts to take power. By the time the 2024 election comes around there is no way mere voting will block their path to taking and retaining power nationally for the foreseeable future.
Coincidentally, Fred Cheney was on RN this morning explaining why, even in 1995, he could no longer be a Liberal once the Rodent began doing what Trump has now done to the repugs – purging anyone with a shred of morality, ethics or respect for the individual.
He was especially excoriating on RoboDebt – “It should not have needed the High Court to rule it illegal, no-one with a shred of decency could have proposed and supported it“.
Yes, he was very good. It was interesting that presenter Karvelas later read out a listener’s comment that Cheney had become a ‘socialist’, which the listener opined is a common fate of retired Liberals. From that it would seem that any respect for the rule of law, any belief that torturing children to make a point is immoral and any idea that a government should put the national interest before short-term partisan politics is socialist, because they were all things Cheney thought the Liberals had lost since his time. Not that difficult to see why the ‘teal’ independents might be finding an audience, is it?
Good for Fred Cheney. I also stopped voting Liberal the day Howard became parliamentary leader for the umpteenth time.
Given half a chance, pandering to the religious right for votes, the same huge wedge will happen in Oz via the LNP with influence of both radical right libertarian Koch thinks tanks, Tanton’s alt right ‘environmentalist’ movement, claiming overpopulation leading to ‘the great replacement’, promotion by Murdoch media, and solution is banning abortion?
The issue in the Anglosphere and Europe for nativist &/or conservative libertarians is that they presume power will be unobtainable, by electoral means, with increasing diversity and the ‘great replacement’ diluting honourable WASP bloodlines.
“History will condemn”? History is written by the victors, and it’s increasingly looking like the victors will be the United States of Gilead.
For those only familiar with the TV series, Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale was written in horror at Reagan’s reactionary religious regime in 1985.
Optimistic for a Jeremiad then but now there will be no balm in Gilead.
There are various political movements gaining strength around the world that, if they are aware of such dystopian visions, are taking them as guides rather than warnings.
I will never understand why Ruth Bader Ginsberg didn’t have the decency to stand down from the Supreme Court while Obama was in power, allowing him to appoint someone younger who would balance out the court. Apart from anything else, surely she must have tired of the burden she carried in that court. Surely she would have liked some time to herself before she died.
The anti choice thugs in the US have been vicious, violent, and unrelenting. So many of them, at least on the frontlines, are women. Watch the videos of how these people attack women and volunteers outside clinics in America. They are foul. And if they are successful in this in the US, they will up their campaigns here, especially if an LNP government is re-elected. I have a horrible feeling we are not prepared for this level of attack.
Agree completely. If successful this will quickly flow through to Australia as the evangelical groups and those opposed to same sex marriage will see it as a tremendous vote of confidence in their hope to return to the past when men were men and women did as they were told. I suspect it would also receive some support from some of the new immigrant groups in Australia whose distinctiveness is partially based on religious identity.
I fear very much if the LNP is re-elected with Morrison in charge he could easily use the movement that sprang from this decision to move towards an autocratic state.
As an aside, I wonder if the early theorists(von-Hayek, Buchanan) of neo-liberalism in the economic sphere would see that the political/cultural implications of the application of the ideology would lead to the rise of populist autocracies that look back to the uncomplicated past, not to the troubled future.
I really don’t think that economists like Hayek and Buchanan thought beyond economics. And as long as the economics are neo-liberal, I don’t think that they cared much about politics beyond how governments brought about neo liberal economic policies. The politics which the Republicans are indulging in would be anathema to neo liberal economists, to say nothing of their neo liberal forebears, Adam Smith and Locke, who would no doubt be very puzzled at how the Republicans can claim they are the party of small government whilst at the same time seeking to use government to control people’s bodies, reproductive choices, and marriage choices.
There was a commentator, and I wish I could remember who it was, who said after the fall of the Berlin Wall that we would now have a world with the worst of the communist systems and the worst of the capitalist system, and I think they were unfortunately correct.
Yes they did, history research Dr. Nancy MacLean (‘Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America’) described Buchanan as a ‘segregation economist’, hence, the crossover with the eugenics or white nationalists, nowadays the alt right.
Radical right libertarian ideology, nominally pure economics aka Calvin, Smith, et al. but according to many, is based on eugenics (if not race), of class though being joined at the hip with influence of Malthus, Galton, social Darwinism; now coursing through global but esp. Anglosphere networks of Koch think tanks for Brexit, Trump etc..
Yes, but I don’t think the economists of those times thought of eugenics and white nationalism as politics as such, because those beliefs were so engrained in the thinking at the time that they were seen as being axiomatic. I don’t think that they necessarily thought of the political structure that would be needed in the future to uphold those beliefs.
It has become very apparent using nostalgia for oldies etc. aka ‘the rise of populist autocracies that look back to the uncomplicated past, not to the troubled future‘ one thinks that is the Anglosphere plan all along using ageing monocultural electorates to vote against their descendants future…. older people now outnumber younger….
In research focused on Brexit and Hungary, development of ‘collective narcissism’ had been then used for ‘pensioner populism’ aka Tea Party later Capitol Hill etc.; has allowed hollowing out of Hungary (where there is a Koch linked think tank popular with UK Trade Envoy Abbott et al.).
I will never understand why Ruth Bader Ginsberg didn’t have the decency to …
So nice for you to have a woman to blame.
Grow up.
The Republicans stopped consideration of a Supreme Court candidate for a year. I’m sure they would have had no problem doing so for longer.
She could have retired before that. Although possibly nobody thought that even the republicans would stoop as low as they did.
That was when the Republicans held the Senate. Ginsburg could have retired in 2014 or earlier when the Democrats were in the majority.
The repugs recaptured the House in the 2010 midterms so would have vetoed any Senate confirmation of SCotUS nominees – both Chambers must concur.
Obama’s policy of reaching across the aisle in a spirit of bipartisanship throughout 2008-2010 – on numerous issues – when the Dems. held both was sheer idiocy.
I don’t think you are right – there is no mention of House involvement in SCOTUS confirmation proceedings according to a detailed Wikpedia article (see: Nomination and confirmation to the Supreme Court of the United States) – or in any of the other articles that came up in my search (eg see:findlaw.com)
Would she have been confirmed by the then Senate? The Republicans under McConnel blocked even consideration of Merrick Garland – a man and a much more moderate jurist than anyone you seem to be imagining as a replacement for RBG. Blaming RBG for this seems like a bit of a brainf&rt.
I think if she’d done it earlier in his presidency, even when the Republicans held power in the senate, it would have been a lot easier to get through.
I am not blaming Ginsberg for this. Jesus. Some of you need to get over yourselves. It’s a wonder you can face every day, you’re so pathetically sensitive.
A trawl of the archives will reveal that I told’ja, Oh My Brothers (re: Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange – a tad before ya time for most) late 2018. I fact I anticipated the decision to be Trump’s doing but it turned out to be Biden who the ‘beneficary’. the author of the article has recognised the “Lincoln” in Biden; not one war (this time) but one judge at a time. The Red and Blue are NOT that different when Waren and Sanders are removed from the game.
Even if the decision proceeds in the current form (and the form COULD change as per the inclination of the CJ John Roberts; a Bush-appointee) the decision will NOT BAN abortions. What is occurring is that the Constitutional underpinning is being removed. In basic terms the Court is declaring that “the Federal Government does not AND ought not to have a policy on this matter”. In other words, the matter of abortion is a State and NOT a Federal concern. That is, the States have the prerogative to decide when life begins: one month, two months,..nine months; whatever.
Then there are the myriad of polls regarding abortion being acceptable in the community within the USA. The reading of your humble correspondent suggests that there is some acquiescence for abortions but under strict conditions and not as a means of contraception. The argument as to ‘sovereignty’ of one’s person has been undermined; expanded below.
Aside from the so called “moral” claim that abortion is inherently wrong (read murder) it will be interesting as to the effect the decision has on the forthcoming mid-terms. In any event Congress has the right to make Federal laws but *I* doubt if congress will monkey with the decision of CJ Roberts although Congress does have the right to do so. Given the majority such tinkering could end in political death for individual Congressmen (or is that persons nowadays).
The Puritan Age is upon us again. It is NOT the decision, per se, that is interesting but that core of Christianity has, over the last half-century, accommodated everything from women priests to trans-gender recognition to homosexual marriage
yet has held (rigidly?) to being anti-abortion. Just were did I put my list of Biblical injunctions? About 120 (80 in the Old and about 40 in the New Testament) injunctions on homosexuality alone! Free Speech zones have beem removed at English-speaking university campuses and there exists now “acceptable” and “unacceptable” topics and sentiments (ask Douglas Murray).
Identity per se has promoted an up-market form of Fascism. The decision could NOT have occurred if Eco-identity and overt proclamations of lesbianism hand not trashed 70s (Greer, Wendy Bacon type) Feminism. Similarly this such matters are also effecting regional conflicts within the EU in terms of the Commission’s “one size for all” mentality. The eastern members (Poland in particular) are not happy with the social implications.
The proposed reversal is more than a trophy for the Religious Right; it is also an acknowledgement of the polarisation of politics within the USA and the defeat of Feminism at its own game. One may even include a desire for diminished federalism for the Republicans and the Right Wing of the Dems.