Expect more, and worse, from the GOP
The individual most responsible for threatening women’s reproductive rights in this country is not Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. — or, for that matter, any of his reactionary colleagues on the Supreme Court. It’s Senate Minority Leader Mitch Mcconnell.
If Alito’s meanspirited, incoherent draft opinion striking down Roe v. Wade becomes the court’s final ruling, Mcconnell, R-KY., told USA Today, it is “possible” that Republicans in Congress will seek a nationwide ban on abortion. So much for the GOP lie about sending the issue back to the states.
But no one should be surprised. This is the culmination of decades of rank dishonesty by a Republican Party determined, despite overwhelming public opposition, to take away women’s right to terminate unwanted or unsafe pregnancies. That was the goal from the beginning. That remains the goal today.
And Mcconnell has done more than anyone else to put that goal within reach.
As majority leader, he systematically assembled an unassailable far-right Supreme Court majority that was carefully tailored to strike down Roe. When Justice Antonin Scalia, the court’s most vocal Roe opponent, died suddenly in February 2016, President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace him. Mcconnell refused to give Garland even a Senate hearing, let alone a confirmation vote.
Mcconnell took the ridiculous position that the vacancy had occurred too close to the coming presidential election — nine months away. This unprecedented, unprincipled use of Mcconnell’s power allowed President Donald Trump to nominate Neil M. Gorsuch to take Scalia’s seat on the court; Gorsuch was confirmed in April 2017. To make this happen in a closely divided Senate, Mcconnell eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees.
The next time Republicans howl and scream about the notion that Democrats would even think about increasing the number of justices, remind them that Mcconnell reduced the court roster from nine to eight for an entire year.
Like all of Trump’s court picks, Gorsuch had been vetted by the far-right Federalist Society — successfully vetted, apparently, as all three seem ready to join Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas in taking back the rights protected by Roe.
To replace retiring Justice Anthony M. Kennedy — a swing vote on the court who had written the decision legalizing samesex marriage, which relied in part on the Roe precedent — Mcconnell rushed Brett M. Kavanaugh through the Senate confir
knowledge and care complicated, even illegal. Anthony Comstock, a devout Christian, was appalled by the New York City streets, which, in his view, teemed with prostitutes and pornography. He was also offended by explicit advertisements for birth control devices, and soon identified the contraceptive industry as one of his targets. Comstock was certain that contraceptives promoted lust and lewdness.
In 1872, Comstock wrote an anti-obscenity bill and took it to Washington. And on March 3, 1873, Congress passed a law, eventually known as the Comstock Act, that defined contraceptives as obscene and illicit and made it a federal offense to disseminate birth control through the mail or across state lines.
The Comstock Act was on the books until 1936, making the sale of contraceptives illegal. That means that my own mother would have grown up without access to or information about contraception as a teenager. And of course, this also made family planning, once she got married, all but impossible.
Well into the 1900s, abstinence was considered the only true method of birth control. Yet some women couldn’t even safely choose abstinence, as marital rape wasn’t recognized as a crime in every state until 1993. Let that one sink in.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Indian Health Service sterilized as many as one in four Indigenous women without their consent. By 1976, up to half of all Indigenous women in the United States had been sterilized. Many of them weren’t told about the procedure. Instead, they believed they were receiving a necessary medical treatment.
And most recently, after the last administration amended the Affordable Care Act provisions, insurance-covered access to birth control is only guaranteed in eight states; the rest allow employers to opt out on the grounds of religious and in some cases “moral” objections.
I find that breathtakingly unfair, penalizing the poorest women, many of them women of color. Put curtly, shouldn’t we love a breathing child (and their mother) more than the easily exploited idealization of the unborn fetus? As it stands, we already don’t have enough social support systems for mothers and children.
And to say that a fetus is a baby being murdered is hyperbole. It’s melodramatic. It’s akin to saying that an acorn is already a oak, a larvae already a butterfly.
Women are both oaks and butterflies, a stubborn and lovely lot who want and deserve agency over their bodies. So just go with that. I suspect you have no choice.