Ursula K. LeGuin on abortion rights:

My friends at NARAL asked me to tell you what it was like before Roe vs Wade. They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke….

What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like?

And meanwhile what was it like for that guy, the boyfriend? Nothing. It was like nothing. Nothing happened to him, it all happened to her. He could go on his way rejoicing; she could not.

It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child.

But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children. The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents

That’s an aspect of abortion rights you’d think even feral conservatives could grasp. Isn’t it better for children to be wanted as opposed to forced? Taking the long view, isn’t that a profoundly better way to be born? Isn’t it better even for relations between women and men, and among couples, for women not to be basically prisoners and slaves? Wouldn’t you think?

Amy Davidson Sorkin on how it’s going to be if Alito’s poison pen ruling stands:

The most immediate effect of Dobbs, if the draft opinion holds, will be that tens of millions of women will abruptly lose access to abortion. The ruling itself would not institute a ban, but it would give states almost boundless power to do so. More than twenty states already have measures in place that would severely curtail access: “trigger laws,” designed to go into effect once Roe is overturned; restrictions in state constitutions; or laws that predate Roe but were left on the books. After the draft was leaked, Louisiana legislators moved forward with a bill that would not only ban almost all abortions but would define them as homicides. Sixteen states, meanwhile, have laws protecting abortion rights. This should be cold comfort to people who live in those jurisdictions or who have the financial means to travel. Their own rights will be conditional; they may feel that their choice of where to live is constrained; their country will be more divided and unequal than it is now. But the burden will fall most heavily on Americans with less money.

Reading, I was forgetting even to think about the “pregnant person” issue but then it intruded suddenly, out of nowhere.

But a Republican-controlled Congress could also, with the help of a Republican President, introduce a nationwide ban. Following the leak, people around the country donated to funds that, for example, would help someone of limited means in Missouri, which has an onerous trigger law, pay for a plane ticket to obtain an abortion in Massachusetts. These efforts echo the work of groups such as the Jane Collective, which helped women find reputable abortion providers during the pre-Roe era. They are a positive means of providing mutual support—for now. Some Missouri legislators, however, have pushed for a measure that would allow anyone who helps someone obtain an out-of-state abortion to be sued. A follow-up case to Dobbs could easily involve a pregnant person’s unrestricted right to travel to get care in another state. (Women who have miscarriages may be exposed to legal scrutiny, too.) In fact, Alito’s opinion offers a blueprint for a future finding that the Constitution not only doesn’t protect abortion but prohibits it.

It’s so abrupt and out of place I wonder if there’s an editorial mandate or similar. “Say it at least once to keep the screamers off our backs.” But still, as always, it’s only women this is done to. It’s only women who might be criminally prosecuted and convicted and punished for trying to stop being pregnant. It’s not something men ever have to face, because their bodies are the ones that don’t get pregnant, that can’t get pregnant, that never get pregnant.

New Mexico:

“Historic” and “extreme” weather conditions could fan a wildfire in New Mexico which is already the second biggest ever seen in the US state.

The so-called Hermits Peak Fire has been burning for more than a month and has torn through an area larger than the city of Chicago.

Many families have been left homeless and thousands have been evacuated.

Winds, near-record high temperatures and dry conditions are now expected to stoke the blaze further.

This is the new reality. In some places it’s rising sea levels, flooding, land disappearing the way it is in the bayous south of New Orleans, in other places it’s crops failing because of heat and lack of water or torrential rain, in other other places it’s wildfires devouring whole towns.

The frequency of large wildfires has increased dramatically in recent decades.

Compared with the 1970s, fires larger than 10,000 acres (40 sq km) are now seven times more common in the west of the US, according to Climate Central, an independent organisation of scientists and journalists.

And the trend is not going to turn around.

Make sure to nail all the windows closed before releasing the cyanide.

As the Supreme Court considers potentially overturning Roe v. Wade, abortion rights activists are heralding abortion pills as a potential option in places where clinics may have to close — but several red states are already cracking down on the pills.

They’ll be mandating bags over the head next.

The governor of Tennessee signed a law in May making it a felony to mail abortion pills, punishable by 20-year imprisonment and a $50,000 fine. The law also adds further restrictions to medication abortion.

There is no crime worse than aiding The Enemy Woman to be free.

Unbelievable.

Clair Wills suggests we think about Ireland’s experience with the unwanted pregnancy problem:

In a couple of weeks’ time, on May 25, Ireland will mark the fourth anniversary of the abortion referendum, when, with broad cross-party support, 66.4 percent of the population voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution. 

Adopted following a deeply divisive referendum in 1983, “the Eighth” asserted the right to life of the unborn, “with due regard to the equal rights of the mother.” Abortion had been illegal in Ireland since the passage of the British Offences Against the Person Act 1861, which was kept on the statute books after independence. But for religious conservatives it was not illegal enough.

In the early 1980s an alliance of conservative and right-wing religious groups rode the wave of Catholic fervor that washed over Ireland following Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1979.

Just what Ireland needed: a wave of Catholic fervor. The mother and baby homes, the laundries, the industrial schools weren’t enough; the rapey priests weren’t enough; the general priestly dominance wasn’t enough.

The baleful consequences of the Eighth for Irish women and children quickly became apparent, and over the years further amendments guaranteeing the right to travel for an abortion and the right to information were added to the constitution, in order to try to soften the restrictive legislation.

You can’t abort here, but do feel free to nip over to Liverpool and abort to your heart’s content.

the No campaign (those against repealing the Eighth) tried to position itself as the defender of the rights of children—who were no longer described as the unborn, but the “preborn.” This argument didn’t wash with most people, and part of the reason for that, I’m sure, were the ongoing revelations of abuses in Ireland’s religious-run Mother and Baby Homes, the dead babies buried in septic tanks, and the scandal of forced adoptions, that had been in the news since the Irish Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes began its work in 2015.

Not to mention the previous revelations about the laundries and industrial schools, pits of horror all of them. Defender of the rights of children in a pig’s eye.

Garrett Epps on Alito’s arrogance:

…one paragraph in Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization stands out for its thoroughgoing mix of hypocrisy and dishonesty. Advocates of legalized abortion, Alito writes, argue that “without the availability of abortion … people will be inhibited from exercising their freedom to choose the types of relationships they desire, and women will be unable to compete with men in the workplace and in other endeavors.”

Do they? I don’t know. I just argue that women should be able to stop being pregnant if they don’t want to be pregnant.

But, Alito explains, the foes of abortion have the answer to this lament:

They explain that attitudes about the pregnancy of unmarried women have changed drastically; that federal and state laws ban discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, that leave for pregnancy and childbirth are now guaranteed by law in many cases, that the costs of medical care associated with pregnancy are covered by insurance or government assistance; that States have increasingly adopted “safe haven” laws, which generally allow women to drop off babies anonymously; and that a woman who puts her new­born up for adoption today has little reason to fear that the baby will not find a suitable home. They also claim that many people now have a new appreciation of fetal life and that when prospective parents who want to have a child view a sonogram, they typically have no doubt that what they see is their daughter or son.

Blah blah blah blah. A woman can still not want to be pregnant, and that’s all that’s relevant.

Now there are three things wrong with this rosy picture of childbirth. First, the all-caring nanny state that Alito describes—guaranteeing medical care, pregnancy leave, and freedom from discrimination—not only does not exist for most Americans but also has been blocked in large part by Alito and the others who form his majority (we do not know whether he has five votes or six, though he writes with the assurance of a ward heeler who knows the fix is in to stay). As of 2020, 91.4 percent of Americans do have some form of health insurance—but 30 million Americans do not. One reason that many do not is that the Court’s conservative majority went out of its way to gut the Medicaid expansion provision of the Affordable Care Act, which offered health insurance to lower-income Americans; as a result of that decision, conservative states have refused to allow families within their borders to take advantage of this program. Since then, Alito himself, with the conservative majority, has made it clear that any employer with the vaguest kind of religious objection to contraception doesn’t have to provide insurance that covers it—a gap that harms women in particular.

Listen, we have to keep punishing poor people for being poor, abortion or no abortion. Eyes on the prize, folks.

Clarence Thomas tells us he will not be bullied.

Following protests sparked by the leak of a draft U.S. Supreme Court decision indicating the justices are poised to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, Justice Clarence Thomas said on Friday that the court cannot be “bullied.”

We know. That’s the nature of the Court: once they’re there, we’re stuck with them (barring impeachment, which is vanishingly rare).

Thomas, one of the most conservative justices on the nine-member court, made only a few passing references to the protests over the leaked draft opinion as he spoke at a judicial conference in Atlanta.

As a society, “we are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like,” Thomas said.

Oh yes, unlike all those other societies that don’t want particular outcomes. Which societies would those be exactly? Is there a list?

“We can’t be an institution that can be bullied into giving you just the outcomes you want. The events from earlier this week are a symptom of that.”

Therefore the Dred Scott ruling was okie doke, yes?

Kathryn Joyce wrote about Amy Coney Barrett and abortion and the “supply” of babies the day after the leaked ruling:

If you want to understand what using adoption as the solution to unplanned pregnancies looks like, you don’t need to look far. But you do need to look. There’s a long and ugly history in the U.S. of coercive and even forced adoption. From roughly 1945 to 1972 — the year before the Supreme Court’s original Roe v. Wade decision — somewhere between 1.5 million and 6 million women relinquished infants for adoption, often after being “sent away” to homes for unwed mothers, where many women faced brutal coercion, were prohibited from contact with outsiders, went through labor and gave birth in segregated sections of hospitals, and were urged to relinquish their newborns while recovering from anesthesia.

What’s not to like?

After Roe v. Wade, the number of children relinquished for adoption began to drop precipitously. In 1972, close to 20 percent of unmarried pregnant white women relinquished their babies for adoption, but by the late 1990s, the rate had dropped to around 1 percent. (Infant relinquishment rates among never-married Black women have been statistically zero for decades.) 

For some people, that steep decline in the number of American children available for adoption was a problem. The stats Alito cited in his opinion — contrasting an overly abundant “demand” for adoptable children with a “virtually nonexistent” “supply” — reveals a little-recognized truth. First, adoption is an industry driven by supply and demand, as unpalatable as those terms may sound when we’re talking about human children. Second, the reflexive liberal retort to anti-abortion rhetoric — well, those right-wingers had better be ready to adopt all those extra babies! — badly misunderstands how this particular industry works. 

Third, these people are fucked in the head. A big “supply” of babies for other people to raise should not be a goal! Women are not work benches where babies are cranked out, and babies are not objects to be cranked out!

[I]n the mid-2000s, some anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers began trying to deploy market research to determine what “subconscious emotional motivators” might make adoption more appealing [to the baby-havers]. Two reports that emerged from that research — one bluntly titled “Birthmother, Good Mother: Her Story of Heroic Redemption” — counseled CPCs to use a common message: that single women who opted to parent their children were being selfish and immature, while choosing adoption was more mature and loving and even, in some cases, a chance for a woman to “prove her character by relinquishing her child.” 

That sort of rhetoric had real effects. One mother I met was sent to a modern maternity home in Washington state when she got pregnant at 19. There she was told that choosing adoption would both please God and prove that she loved her child more than if she kept him. Isolated from her friends, family and boyfriend, she was instead encouraged to spend time with the couple who wanted to adopt her child. She came to feel like a surrogate rather than a “real” mother, and when she expressed doubts about going through with the plan, she was chastised severely. When she fell into a deep depression after relinquishing her child, the family closed what was originally intended to be an open adoption, and she wasn’t allowed to see her son again.

That’s nice.

There are a lot of stories like this, but they’re often rendered invisible in a culture where adoption is seen as a unilateral good or a “win-win-win”; where Democrats have long sought to triangulate the abortion morass by offering, somehow, to “make adoption more available“; and where media depictions of birthmothers are often limited to seedy reality-show storylines. In a dynamic where adoptive parents are almost universally wealthier and more powerful than birthparents, even the language we use privileges one side of the story, leaving almost no neutral way to discuss the issue. 

In short the birthmothers are sluts and the baby belongs to those much better richer more powerful people in the SUV.

“The underlying consideration of adoption in the leaked opinion reflects the view that the decline of American infants available for adoption is inherently an adverse trend,” says sociologist Gretchen Sisson, author of the forthcoming book “Relinquished: The American Mothers Behind Infant Adoption.”

Which is sick. What are infants available for adoption? Infants without parents of their own, that’s what – because of death or emergency or some other bad, tragic obstacle. They’re not desirable consumer items! That is, they shouldn’t be, but it turns out they are.

Guy with an ugly habit of calling women names in public.

This has taken my breath away. (You know how that goes, right? That one that’s so stunning you stare at it for long seconds, forgetting to breathe?)

The shops are running low on tomato sauce, so let’s offer farmers incentives for growing more tomatoes.

The adoption system is running low on babies, so we will now force women to produce them.

If Amy Coney Barrett really said that, it’s absolutely stunning.

Wearing a bag over the head is now mandatory in Afghanistan.

For women that is. Not for men, of course. Men get to see and breathe and talk like normal human beings. Women have to wear bags over their heads because they are whores.

Afghan women will have to wear the Islamic face veil for the first time in decades under a decree passed by the country’s ruling Taliban militants.

The country’s woman-hating theocrats who seized power by force. And the thing is not a face veil, it’s a literal bag over the head, with a thick mesh to peer through in hopes of seeing the car in time to avoid being run over.

The decree was passed by the Taliban’s Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue.

They could always imprison men’s genitals instead, but no, men’s “vice” is always women’s fault. Allah hates women.

The Quran, Islam’s holy book, tells Muslims – men and women – to dress modestly. Male modesty has been interpreted to be covering the area from the navel to the knee. For women it is generally seen as covering everything except their face, hands and feet when in the presence of men they are not related or married to.

In other words men remain free while women are hobbled. “Islam’s holy book” hates women.

Not our crimes.

A transgender woman was sentenced Friday to 25 years in prison for forcing the 7-year-old daughter she fathered to participate in child pornography.

The 7-year-old daughter HE fathered. It’s a man’s crime.

Marina Volz, 32, of Franklin, was sentenced, along with three others, by Superior Court Judge Peter Tober for their roles in running a child pornography production company in their Coburn Lane home in Franklin Township.

…

Assistant Somerset County Prosecutor Brian Stack told the judge that the quartet was a “vortex of darkness” that “snuffed out” the girl who was taken from her mother in Oregon to New Jersey to be in the child pornography.

Imagine that poor child’s life there.

While not delving into the details of the crime, Tober said it involved neck collars, a cage in the basement, sex toys and other devices.

A horror movie, in other words. Silence of the Lambs but worse.

Volz, Romero and Allen operated what they described as a “family-owned transgender pornography production studio specializing in amateur, BDSM and taboo fetish content” from the residence.

Romero and Allen jointly sexually assaulted the child and filmed the assault, the video of which was recovered from multiple electronic items within the home.

But it was transgender pornography, so maybe it should be considered inclusive rather than criminal and sadistic?

I grew up just inside the Somerset County line. No transgender porn around. I was lucky.

I’ll be darned, the ACLU has a women’s rights project. I suppose it’s fully “inclusive.”

Its director is Ria Tabacco Mar, who writes in the Washington Post today about Alito’s cheery view of pregnancy:

Among the many shocking elements of the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, this one jumped out at me: the rosy picture of pregnancy painted by Justice Samuel Alito, who has never been pregnant.

Some wags on Twitter are asking how she can know that. Never mind; she corrects her error soon enough.

But anyone who has been pregnant — or cares to understand — knows that the reality in the United States is not rosy at all. At best, pregnant Americans must navigate a patchwork of leaky protections, a labyrinth of financial costs and penalties, and a health-care landscape that threatens the lives of the most vulnerable.

Ah yes, pregnant Americans. Pregnant citizens, pregnant individuals, pregnant persons – there’s a nice little bouquet of ways to avoid saying “women.” The ACLU probably has a handy list of them for staff. Mar does also use the w-word though – maybe she’s a rebel. Maybe she and Chase Strangio look daggers at each other in the corridors.

…there remains a persistent gap between the letter of the law and the lived experience of pregnant workers. That’s certainly been our experience at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, where we routinely represent women fired or forced into unpaid leave for being pregnant. These women aren’t anomalies. In the nearly half-century since 1978, pregnant workers have been continually denied reasonable accommodations they need to keep working safely or are outright fired for being pregnant, leading to more than 50,000 charges of pregnancy discrimination in the last decade alone.

In this context it’s reasonable and indeed necessary to say “workers” along with “women” since the subject is employment law.

These trends persist even though women now make up a majority of the workforce, and 85 percent of female workers will become pregnant at some point, with most continuing to work through their pregnancies — and beyond.

If only all of the ACLU could write this clearly.

The United States has the dubious distinction of having the worst maternal mortality rate among wealthy countries. And appalling racial disparities in resources and health care make pregnancy more life-threatening for some than for others. In Mississippi — the state whose abortion ban is currently before the Supreme Court in a case that the Alito draft addresses — the maternal mortality rate for Black women is nearly three times higher than that for White women. And in Washington, where the Supreme Court sits, Black people make up just 45 percent of the population but 90 percent of pregnancy-related deaths.

This is very important information, that everyone should be aware of. That’s why it’s crucial to state it clearly – to say both “women” and “Black.”

But in the very next paragraph…

Despite the fact that he has two children of his own, Alito displays astonishing ignorance about what many pregnant people and their families face in the wealthiest nation in the world…

At least women are there in the final paragraph.

I, for one, would love to live in the country that the draft opinion describes, where pregnancy is physically and economically safe, valued and supported. Unfortunately, we live in this one — where even a wanted pregnancy and birth can be among the most economically disruptive experiences most people can expect to face. In this America, reproductive autonomy remains a pillar of women’s equality and livelihoods. Until Alito has lived in our house, he has no business knocking down its walls.

And of course he never will live in our house, because he’s a man.

How sad it is that we can’t do without women entirely, because of that one silly arrangement…

Brian Dowling has set his sights on becoming a first-time dad in 2022.

The Big Brother icon, 43, is hoping that this year will finally be the right time for him and husband Arthur Gourounlian to welcome their first child together.

The lovebirds, who tied the knot in 2015, have both shared their dreams of becoming parents over the years, but the process has been much harder than they first anticipated – partly due to the strict surrogacy laws in Ireland.

The process, you see – it turns out to be much harder than they expected because there has to be a woman involved somewhere along the line, and those bitches are so difficult. And Ireland just makes it worse! It has strict laws about borrowing a woman’s body to manufacture a baby for you! When it should be as simple as hopping on a bus!

As it stands, surrogacy is unregulated in Irish law and mothers of children born through surrogacy, even through gestational surrogacy – in which the child is biologically theirs – have no rights to their children.

Isn’t that what Brian and Arthur want? That the woman-machine they get to make the baby for them has (of course) no rights to their baby?

Brian, who hopes to welcome a child through surrogacy with husband Arthur, told Daily Mirror that he has to remind himself to keep a positive mindset amid the setbacks due to the strict Irish laws.

Has he considered kidnapping a woman?

“This isn’t just about gay guys and husbands trying to have families – everyone struggles. But I think in Ireland, the rules around surrogacy are absolutely ridiculous. The fact that the female egg is put into the surrogate, and then the surrogate is named as the biological mother just isn’t right – it’s not even related to the child.”

“It.”

Department of Ridiculous Headlines:

Can the women’s movement be as effective without the word ‘women’?

Of course not. Any other questions?

If you were raised on 1970s feminism, as I was, the linguistic shift toward phrases such as “birthing people” and “uterus havers” has been a bit jarring.

No it hasn’t. It’s been utterly enraging.

The incongruity between old language and new became particularly noticeable this week, after Politico published a leaked draft of a Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade.

Particularly noticeable and enraging. You’re god damn right it did.

In 1987, the National Women’s Law Center called the nomination of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court “a particular threat to women” because of his lack of deference to precedents such as Roe. Today, with Roe actually in danger, the organization warns that any justice who signs on to the leaked opinion “is fueling the harm and violence that will happen to people who become pregnant in this country.”

Exactly, and it needs to stop.

Nor is it alone in blurring the old focus on women; an official from Planned Parenthood in California, along with Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and feminist writer Mona Eltahawy, were among those who focused on “people” rather than “women.”

I too have been collecting examples. It’s horribly easy to do, because they’re ubiquitous.

It is hard to fault more inclusive language, of course

No, no it isn’t. Stop right there. It isn’t. We don’t order BLM to use “more inclusive language.” We don’t tell people campaigning to act on climate change to be more “inclusive” of oil companies. We don’t expect unions to “include” bosses. Use your damn brain. It’s very easy to fault “inclusive language” in fights where it doesn’t belong.

— but it is also impossible not to wonder whether “people who become pregnant” constitutes the same kind of effective political coalition that “women” did.

Wonder no more. Of course it doesn’t. Why? Because it veils the existence of women, which language has always done and continues to do. Invisible people can’t be an effective political coalition.

What used to be called “women’s health” is now for “individuals with a cervix,” media outlets (including this one) write about the threat to Roe and “pregnant individuals,” up-to-date midwives talk of “birthing people” and “chestfeeding,” and “women’s swimming” can now cover both those born with male bodies who identify as women and those born with female bodies who identify as men.

This shift has been controversial on the right, but seems to have engendered little discussion on the left about how it might affect future political organizing and other efforts once tightly tied to womanhood.

Well, there’s more than McArdle seems to think, but she’s right that there’s not nearly enough.

So in reducing women to their constituent body parts, or to discrete activities such as birthing, we may also reduce their political power to something closer to that of “people with colons.” Dignity and inclusion may be worth that sacrifice. But such a momentous decision should probably not be made without extensive debate, and a full understanding of what we’re giving up when we choose to write women out of the discussion.

Nothing is worth that sacrifice. Funny how it’s always women who are supposed to sacrifice, while the other campaigns get to go right on naming themselves.

Kathleen Stock has a dazzling piece on queeritude. It’s a must-read; I’ll just dangle a few amuse-bouches to tempt you.

In recent years, queerness has also become a fascinatingly multifunctional symbolic object in the psyche of the nation, simultaneously representing both sexily avant-garde transgression and fully paid-up membership of the British establishment.

Both a salad dressing and a drain cleaner!

A project on the history of the gerrymandered categories of “LGBTQ+” and “queer” is, of course, a fantastic idea; were it done properly, it would be genuinely exciting. Ideally such a museum would interrogate the sociological and historical conditions of its own movement. It might ask, for instance: what economic forces have shaped its transition from the gay rights movement of 20th Century to the present rainbow soup, in which many lesbians and gays feel they are not waving but drowning?

Read on.

Well how about that. Strangio manages to retweet Democracy Now using The Word not once but twice.

Alito cited Matthew Hale in his draft. Who? Bess Levin at Vanity Fair has the deets:

As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern notes, the draft—which could change before a the final ruling, as could the various justices’ votes—doesn’t just lay out the case for why Roe should be overturned, it goes full scorched earth. Alito, Stern writes, “does not seek out any middle path. He disparages Roe and its successors as dishonest, illegitimate, and destructive to the court, the country, and the Constitution. He quotes a wide range of anti-abortion activists, scholars, and judges who view abortion as immoral and barbaric; there’s even a footnote that approvingly cites Justice Clarence Thomas’s debunked theory that abortion is a tool of eugenics against Black Americans.” The opinion is an appalling, heinous attack on people who have relied on Roe for nearly half a century, and the most sickening part is that the conservative justice clearly doesn’t give a shit that obliterating the landmark ruling will ruin countless lives. In fact, one might argue, that’s all part of the plan. And if you needed further proof that Alito is pure evil and wants to take the U.S. back to a time when women’s bodies were property for men to control, know that one of the people he cited in his opinion was an English jurist who defended marital rape and had women executed for “witchcraft.”

Yes, Alito literally quoted this guy, who was born in 1609, as a defense for ending Roe v. Wade in 2022. “Two treatises by Sir Matthew Hale,” Alito enthusiastically writes, “described abortion of a quick child who died in the womb as a ‘great crime’ and a ‘great misprision.’ See M. Hale, Pleas of the Crown.”

Well if Matthew Hale said it it must be true.

Yet another one.