Upcoming abortion ruling set to tear the country apart

Think about it this way: If Justice Samuel Alito gets his way and the Trumpist Supreme Court majority voids Roe v. Wade, many states will be forced to begin criminal investigations of women who suffer miscarriages. In these states, abortion is murder.

Exactly how the authorities are supposed to know who’s pregnant is a tricky question. Maybe doctors will be required to turn them in. And what about those home pregnancy tests? Maybe they’ll need to be taken under official supervision. Perhaps pharmacists can be deputized. Hippocratic oath be damned.

Republican state legislators are considering prosecuting women who travel, say, from Missouri to Illinois for legal abortions. Can we expect Texas to administer pregnancy tests at the Mexican border? Otherwise, there could be as many gynecologists as cut-rate dentists in Juarez.

Look, if all this sounds like a bad joke, I wish it were. Most Americans believe there’s a right to privacy bestowed by the U.S. Constitution. Alito, however, assures us that’s not so. His draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade points out that the word “abortion” does not appear in the text. Of course, neither do the words “cellphone” or “woman.” Women participated not at all in the Constitution’s, pardon the expression, gestation. They played no role in 18th century American political life — one of the many reasons constitutional “originalism” makes so little sense. Slavery is another.

Turning government over to law school all-stars was never a good idea. Rationalizing the irrational is what they do. And speaking of irrationality, Alito’s 98-page opinion relies for much of its historical analysis on 17th century English jurist Matthew Hale, who pronounced the abortion of a “quick child” a “great crime.” (A “quick child” is a fetus whose mother can feel its movements — that is, one who is five or six months along.) Hale is notorious for having also decreed that a man can’t rape his wife, as a woman cedes property rights to her womb at marriage. He presided over one of England’s most notorious witchcraft trials in 1662, sentencing two elderly widows to be hanged.

The main reason Americans think there’s a right to privacy is the Fourth Amendment, which affirms, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”

Think about it: What could possibly be a person’s own damn business more than the decision of whether or not to bear a child? Do you really want the government to monitor your neighbor’s intimate life? Your own? If you’re like most Americans, no, you pretty much don’t.

So often in the forefront, Oklahoma has already imprisoned a woman who had a miscarriage after taking illegal drugs — a Native American woman, naturally. It’s hard to imagine them investigating debutantes.

Regardless, polls have shown that the great majority agree with President Bill Clinton’s formulation that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” More than twothirds of respondents to a 2018 Gallup poll said they wouldn’t like to see Roe v. Wade reversed. Most favor little or no restriction on first trimester abortion, but feel quite different about lateterm procedures — roughly the standard courts have established in the decades since 1973.

Now Minority Leader Mitch McConnell tells reporters that a post-Alito Republican Senate “certainly could legislate in that area.” Which can only mean, Mike Tomasky deduces in The New Republic, “that Republicans are contemplating a federal law to make abortion illegal — everywhere.”

And what then? President Joe Biden vetoes it, the 2024 election turns on it, and the United States ruins a lot of women’s lives and tears itself to pieces.