The Supreme Court is taking us back ... way back
Everybody’s been talking about the comments Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas made during his portion of the Dobbs decision. You know, where he basically said birth control and gay marriage are up next. What’s your take? A. Very, very worried he’s right.
B. Comforted by the fact that the other justices in the majority didn’t seem to agree.
C. This whole thing is … aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh.
OK, stop banging your head against the wall.
I can see how crazy this is making you, so I will refrain from mentioning that Donald Trump quickly dispatched a fundraising email taking credit for the Roe decision, which began, “You’re welcome.”
The other justices dissociated themselves from Thomas’ predictions about Repressions for Tomorrow, but face it — politicians and political activists who’ve built their careers fighting women’s right to choice won’t declare victory and take up knitting.
They’ve already started their next moves. Tennessee’s ban on abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy went into effect soon after Roe was overturned. Lawmakers in some states have started targeting morning-after pills and IUDs.
Where do they want to take us? Think about what the world was like back when women had little or no ability to control reproduction. There was, of course, the spinsterhood option. But as much as later generations venerated Susan B. Anthony, her way of life didn’t have widespread appeal.
Totally understandable, however, that most women earlier in our history would yearn to be homemakers. By the middle of the 19th century the cities were filling up with lower-income women putting in 13 or 14 hours a day on the job. One of them, Hester Vaughn, became a feminist cause. As suffragists told her story, she was raped by her employer in Philadelphia, left pregnant and abandoned in one cold attic room with no food. Eventually she went into labor alone and was found lying on the floor next to her dead baby. She was tried for infanticide and sentenced to be hanged, then pardoned by the governor. Becoming an excellent example of the need for an abortion option.
Maybe it’s not fair to pin Vaughn’s fate on Clarence Thomas, but we ought to look back at the time he seems to feel was a golden era in reproductive rights. We’re talking about the land before Griswold v. Connecticut, the ruling in 1965 that held, in part, that it was unconstitutional for states to ban the sale of contraceptives.
At the time, anyone convicted of using a birth control device in Connecticut — even a married couple already raising six kids — could be sentenced to up to a year in prison.
Obviously things are different now. Nevertheless, overturning Roe has pushed us back in time, and before we get shoved any further it’s a good idea to remember that control over reproduction is at the center of the story of women in the modern world.
When it came to things like employment and careers, the great, cosmic dividing line between men and women was always that employers didn’t have to worry about men becoming pregnant. Then along came contraception. Everything changed and a father who dreamed about having his child take over the family business didn’t fall into despair when he heard the baby was a girl. Soon, new mothers had the joy — and yeah, the challenge — of knowing they’d be able to mesh parenthood with careers.
While nobody’s admitting it, this is what the antichoice movement wants to retract. Let’s remind the Supreme Court every day.