It’s 1864 all over again in Arizona
When Arizona’s supreme court last week upheld a Civil War-era law banning abortion even in cases of incest and rape, American women with hearts already burning over the Roe v. Wade repeal went into tachycardia.
Is this how it’s going to be, women running from state to state for abortion help until the last safe harbour closes nationwide? A Trump win would mean yes.
It’s 1864 all over again. Arizona, not even a state until 1912, was a territory containing 9,568 people, presumably white, none of whom enjoyed running water or toilets inside their homes. It was a primitive place. Still is.
Today Arizona has 7.5 million people, 70 per cent of them white, and they must obey a Civil War law that was part of an effort to end contraception, shift control over childbirth from midwives to male doctors, and enforce birth.
As the New York Times explains, former Republican Gov. Doug Ducey achieved all this with strategy and patience. He expanded the Supreme Court from five to seven justices and stacked the court, not with the customary distinguished Democrats and Republicans from the best law schools but with conservative prosecutors with ties to the Federalist Society, an originalist cult.
It’s the same court-stacking tactic favoured by Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who recently announced he will only appoint conservative judges. Liberals and New Democrats need not apply.
And it works. That’s how Arizona ended up with a hateful originalist law that forces women and girls to bear a rapist’s child or their grandfather’s, father’s or brother’s offspring.
But that would be unusual. Surely. Not at all. Genetic genealogy works. DNA tests posted on public ancestry sites are helping police find men like the Golden State Killer while also revealing unknown family ties that flower into wonderful stories about adopted adults reuniting with willing birth families.
But as Atlantic magazine’s Sarah Zhang wrote last month, they’re also uncovering incest. In 1975, she writes, a psychiatric textbook estimated the rate of incest at one in a million births. Feminist scholars had long been uncovering stories of rampant incest and finally, genetics proved them right. The rate is at the very least one in 7,000.
In almost all cases, a genealogist said, “the parents are a father and a daughter or an older brother and a younger sister, meaning a child’s existence was likely evidence of sexual abuse.” Much of this unfolded when abortion was at least theoretically available.
In 1864, the Arizona Speaker of the House was William Claude Jones, a pompadoured man in his 50s, who was originally from Missouri but hopped from state to state indulging in pedophilia.
Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse has tracked his history. Jones presided over enacting that grievous anti-abortion law “in 1864, after he had already abandoned his first wife, and married a 12-year-old and was just weeks away from marrying a 15-year-old, though still a few years away from marrying a 14-year-old.”
The matter of the 12-year-old bride offended people. Legislators in New Mexico asked President James Buchanan to fire Jones but he quit just in time. So even then he was regarded as a sex offender but still birthed a law that is terrorizing Arizonans today while greatly pleasing a select group of fetid grandpas, dads and brothers.
Thanks to the monstrous Jones, Republican governors, legislators, supreme court justices and their heartless almost entirely male cohort, Arizona will see more gravely unwanted children born, barring miscarriage or maternal suicide.
If Donald Trump retakes the presidency this year, these are the kind of life-and-death issues that will torment the good women and men of modern America. The circle turns, the calendar flips back. In Arizona it’s 1864 again, indoor toilets or not.