Moira Donegan doesn’t mince words.
The draft opinion, authored by Samuel Alito, the most rabidly hateful member of the court’s arch-conservative wing, will upend 50 years of precedent and undo a landmark ruling that has profoundly shaped legal doctrine, popular conceptions of the law, and millions of American lives. It will make women prisoners to their own bodies, and to men’s ideas of what those bodies must mean. It will make our country weaker, crueler, stupider and less vibrant.
We’re all prisoners to of in our own bodies, of course, but unwanted pregnancy is a particularly intrusive and disruptive demonstration of that imprisonment.
In a way, the leaked opinion didn’t tell us anything we did not already know: these are the last days of reproductive freedom in America, and most states will soon ban abortion outright, or restrict it so onerously that it is inaccessible within their borders. But Alito’s draft opinion nevertheless represents about as odiously maximalist an approach as the court could have taken.
The opinion does not just overturn Roe and Casey; it expresses outright contempt for the notion that the constitution protects bodily autonomy for women.
Because after all what are women for if they’re not baby factories? What is even the point of them?
The end of legal abortion will not be where the court’s reactionaries stop. They aim to hurt, punish and narrow the lives of Americans in many more cruel and inventive ways.
…
The state compelling a person to be pregnant is not like compelling her to pay taxes. The event doesn’t occur in a courtroom or on a balance sheet; it occurs inside her body.
It is, perhaps, somewhat like the draft. Draft laws are also controversial, for obvious reasons.
In making abortion illegal, the court is imposing a legal status that is so cruel, so personal and so life-altering on half its population, that those subject to this imposition cannot be called free. Is there any condition more essential to democratic citizenship than a person’s control over her own body? Can we call ourselves a free country without it?
Could 1950s Ireland call itself a free country? (Spoiler: no.)
Comments
10 responses to “Prisoners to their own bodies”
Well, some of the judges (I think Alito in particular) have opined that women are not citizens under the constitution, that the Fourteenth Amendment specifically defined a citizen as a man, and therefore women are not protected by it.
That’s why we so needed the ERA. A lot of people I know seem to think all we need is the Fourteenth, but they don’t quite grasp what it actually says. Ever since the bodily autonomy cases (Roe, Casey, Griswold) the court has treated women as if they are citizens.
How long until they strike down Griswold? They’ve gone half way there already, allowing religious zealots the right to deny women contraceptive care.
Are you sure? Scalia (to the outrage of many) said the 14th doesn’t protect against discrimination on the basis of sex. I can’t find any claims about women not being citizens.
I’m guessing this is the part people refer to (Section 2):
At least some (including, I believe, Scalia) have interpreted this to mean that persons are male, citizens are male, etc. While it is a strained interpretation, IMHO, the way it is worded left a loophole for all sorts of trucks to drive through, and now Scalia and his cronies have driven through them.
What people? I couldn’t find any people saying Scalia thinks women aren’t citizens.
Here’s another discussion, from the ACLU:
Not protected isn’t the same as not citizens. He was still wrong, but I can’t find anywhere he said women aren’t citizens. It would be odd if he had because then he would have to think they can’t vote, or run for office.
Ophelia: just wait until the United States’ right wing drives us all the way back to 1889. Or 1730 (there are too many outright monarchists among the crazy right)
I learned about it when I was in my Political Science program (my first degree – it took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up), but didn’t hear anything more about it until about ten years ago, when I started reading more on the topic. I can’t remember exactly where I read it, but it was in more than one source – and not sourcing each other. If I can find it, I’ll pass it on.
I wonder if it could have been an “in effect” kind of claim. As in, by saying the 14th doesn’t protect against discrimination he in effect denied they are citizens.
It would be a really shocking claim for a contemporary SC justice to make, because he’d be agreeing with Taney’s ruling in the Dred Scott case:
That’s a lot more radical than saying the 14th Amendment doesn’t protect women against discrimination.
I’ve been thinking myself it might be more like that sort of claim, or a poor writer putting quotes on what they are interpreting someone as saying. It does happen a lot…and since my Political Science degree was completed in the early 1980s, I could be remembering what we talked about in a somewhat different light.
Of course, the 14th does cover all “citizens” and all persons; it’s almost like he’s claiming we aren’t people.
1950s? The mother-and-baby homes were still running in the 1990s.
And when did women gain the right to terminate pregnancy here? 2018. Four years ago. Except for the six counties ruled by Britain, where it is still illegal.