Category: Notes and Comment Blog

A law professor at UC Irvine contradicts Alito:

Black women’s sexual subordination and forced pregnancies were foundational to slavery. If cotton was euphemistically king, Black women’s wealth-maximizing forced reproduction was queen.

Because those forced pregnancies were worth a lot of money – money for the enslaver, of course, not for the slave.

Ending the forced sexual and reproductive servitude of Black girls and women was a critical part of the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments. The overturning of Roe v. Wade reveals the Supreme Court’s neglectful reading of the amendments that abolished slavery and guaranteed all people equal protection under the law. It means the erasure of Black women from the Constitution.

Mandated, forced or compulsory pregnancy contravene enumerated rights in the Constitution, namely the 13th Amendment’s prohibition against involuntary servitude and protection of bodily autonomy, as well as the 14th Amendment’s defense of privacy and freedom.

Women don’t have bodily autonomy if they can’t cancel unwanted pregnancies. They have even less bodily autonomy than slaves and prisoner and draftees: they are the only humans forced to have another whole entire human being inside them for three quarters of a year. (If you want that resident human it can be a meaningful experience despite the discomforts, but if you don’t want it it’s a whole other story.)

This Supreme Court demonstrates a selective and opportunistic interpretation of the Constitution and legal history, which ignores the intent of the 13th and 14th Amendments, especially as related to Black women’s bodily autonomy, liberty and privacy which extended beyond freeing them from labor in cotton fields to shielding them from rape and forced reproduction. The horrors inflicted on Black women during slavery, especially sexual violations and forced pregnancies, have been all but wiped from cultural and legal memory. Ultimately, this failure disserves all women.

Even Karens. I’ve seen sadistic men rejoicing at the victory over “Karens” on social media since the ruling came down – white men, of course.

To understand the gravity of what is at stake, one need only turn to the Supreme Court’s own recent history. In 2016, Justice Stephen Breyer noted in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, women are 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion. The United States bears the chilling distinction of being the most dangerous place in the industrialized world to give birth, ranking 55th overall in the world.

Pause to let that sink in. 55th!!! We’re one of the very richest yet that’s where we are.

[S]lavery’s vestiges persisted in Southern states, including within the domains of privacy, child rearing and marriage. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, better known as the “Freedmen’s Bureau,” founded March 1865, collected letters written by Black mothers despairing over vile “apprenticeships” whereby their children were kidnapped and returned to bondage under the guise of traineeships.

Congress followed in 1868 with the ratification of the 14th Amendment, which further secured the interests of Black women who had been subjected to cruelties inflicted on them physically, reproductively, and psychologically.

The 14th Amendment opens with the sentence, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States … are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” and as such would be protected by the laws of the United States. Such language applied to infants born to Black women, changing the provisions of law that had long denied Black children citizenship and the protection of laws. Lawmakers were understandably concerned about overturning states laws that had denied children the dignity of personhood.

Reconstruction-era lawmakers that is. There was a ferocious Reaction all too soon. We’re still living in it.

Justice Samuel Alito’s claim, that there is no enumeration and original meaning in the Constitution related to involuntary sexual subordination and reproduction, misreads and misunderstands American slavery, the social conditions of that enterprise and legal history. It misinterprets how slavery was abolished, ignores the deliberation and debates within Congress, and craftily renders Black women and their bondage invisible.

It seems like an incredibly large thing to leave out, but people have been leaving it out all this time.

The Times on Alito’s long patient campaign to make women prisoners of their own bodies again:

Mr. Alito became interested in constitutional law during college largely because he disagreed with the Supreme Court at the time on criminal procedure, the establishment clause and reapportionment, he has written. The court in the 1960s issued rulings on those topics that conservatives disliked, including protecting the rights of suspects in police custody, limiting prayer in public schools, and requiring electoral districts to have roughly equal populations.

More prayer and fewer rights for other people, that’s what he wanted, along with less ability for the fewer-rights people to fight back via the ballot box. I guess that’s “conservatism”? More power and privilege for rich [white] men and much less for everyone else?

But in 2016 and 2020, just as in 1985, a new frontal attack on abortion rights would have failed. With Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg still on the bench, there were not five votes to overturn Roe. This year, there was no longer need for a restrained, slower-burning approach.

Over the objections of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — who agreed that a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks should be upheld, but said that the majority’s “dramatic and consequential ruling is unnecessary to decide the case before us” and violated the principle of judicial restraint — the long-envisioned time for a direct assault on Roe had come.

“Abortion presents a profound moral question,” Justice Alito wrote. “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each state from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

Well, that is, the people carefully gerrymandered and voter-intimidationed to exercise their authority according to Alito’s lifelong wishes.

Brave new world.

They deserve it because…what? They think women get to own their own bodies just like the real people?

Seinfeld jokes fit well.

There are some oddities in the Nottingham Council axes Julie Bindel’s talk at the library story.

Council chiefs cancelled a talk by Julie Bindel, the feminist writer, on protecting women from male violence because it contradicts their position on trans rights.

The talk was scheduled at (and by) the library. Do city councils generally oversee items like what talks libraries are allowed to present? Do they generally veto decisions of that kind, on the grounds that they don’t like the speaker’s ideas?

It doesn’t sound right to me. I’m not an expert in city government but I live in a city and I did work for a city department for several years. It’s my impression that city departments do their own scheduling of talks and deciding of what talks to have. It is just an impression, I haven’t researched it, but I think it’s based on some relevant facts, like how the hell would anybody get anything done if that level of micromanagement were normal? I don’t think city councils do micromanage that way, not least because it would enrage everyone and cause endless argument and fuss and gridlock.

It seems pretty damn highhanded for a council to tell the library what kind of talks it can have. I suppose “within reason” plays its usual role here: I suppose talks by the Proud Boys would be dangerous enough that the higher ups might intervene, but short of that – I doubt this is normal.

On Saturday, Nottingham City Council said allowing Ms Bindel to speak at one of its libraries would violate its commitment to being an “inclusive city”.

But it wouldn’t. Even if you believe the insulting claim that Julie is “anti-inclusive,” it still wouldn’t. One person saying things you don’t agree with at a library branch can’t violate a whole City Council’s commitment to anything. If that were the criterion nobody could talk at all.

Citing its allegiance to the campaign group Stonewall, the council said it was preventing the event from going ahead because of Ms Bindel’s views on transgender rights and in support of the city’s LGBT community.

So because of its allegiance to the misogynistic and totalitarian pests at Stonewall, it’s high-handedly telling a library branch what guest speakers it can and can’t have.

I don’t think this is normal. I wonder if it even violates some of their own rules.

Even the National Women’s Law Center refuses to say it.

Interesting trick, being a national women’s law center while refusing to mention women.

Blah blah blah do this do that but above all DON’T MENTION WOMEN.

No sign of women in that one – you, our, we, our, our, we, we, you – but no women.

People people. Sssshhhhh don’t mention women.

One tiny stumble – they retweeted Rebecca Traister’s quotation from the dissent.

Just an aberration, that one.

You, you, you. But who are you?

Obama does it.

Someone – Americans – but no women.

People.

You you you our we you:

Planned Parenthood also not helping. Pinned tweet:

You, you, you, you. Who? Who are you?

Women. Women, of course, but it doesn’t do to say so.

ACLU not helping AS USUAL.

It’s not persons this enslavement is done to, it’s WOMEN.

The ACLU is so determinedly not an ally that it’s become an enemy. Yesterday of all days they still erased women – when talking about abortion needs!

More responses to Nottingham City Council’s libelous and misogynist actions and statement:

Reactions to Nottingham Council’s breezy libeling of Julie Bindel are harsh.

Nottingham City Council offers a “statement.”

Ok I read the statement. It’s a complete crock of shit.

[Generalized apology and explanation and warning. I’m going to be swearing a lot for the foreseeable future. I’m feeling a level of rage and alienation I wasn’t expecting (it was very unimaginative of me not to expect it).]

A complete crock of shit, I say.

Nottingham City Council has cancelled a booking to use a space at Aspley Library for a talk by author Julie Bindel today (Saturday 25 June). This is due to the speaker’s views on trans gender rights being at odds with aspects of the council’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy.

Explain yourselves! What views? What aspects? At odds how?

But of course they don’t explain any of that, the cowardly lying fucks. They just claim it, in their libelous way, and leave it at that. It’s filthy and disgusting and needs to stop.

All the elucidation they manage to give is:

“While it was known that the event was going to be from a feminist perspective, no information around the speaker’s views on transgender rights was brought to the Library Service’s attention.

Once we became aware of this, we took the decision to cancel the booking. Nottingham is an inclusive city and as a council we support our LGBT community and have committed to supporting trans rights as human rights through Stonewall.  We did not want the use of one of our library buildings for this event, taking place during Pride month, to be seen as implicit support for views held by the speaker which fly in the face of our position on transgender rights.”

What views?

Liars, sneaks, bullies, cowardly lying fucks.

From Pliny:

Starting today.

Abortion bans that were put on the books in some states in the event Roe v. Wade was overturned started automatically going into effect Friday, while clinics elsewhere — including Alabama, Texas and West Virginia — stopped performing abortions for fear of prosecution, sending women away in tears.

“Some patients broke down and could not speak through their sobbing,” said Katie Quinonez, executive director of West Virginia’s lone abortion clinic, whose staff spent the day calling dozens of patients to cancel their appointments. “Some patients were stunned and didn’t know what to say. Some patients did not understand what was happening.”

…

In Alabama, the state’s three abortion clinics stopped performing the procedure for fear providers would now be prosecuted under a law dating to 1951.

At the Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives in Huntsville, the staff had to tell women in the waiting room Friday morning that they could not perform any more abortions that day. Some had come from as far away as Texas for an appointment.

“A lot of them just started breaking down crying. Can you imagine if you had driven 12 hours to receive this care in this state and you are not able to?” clinic owner Dalton Johnson said.

In an instant, women were made slaves to their own bodies again – subordinate beings, inferior beings, beings subject to iron control and harsh revenge.

Fresh Air yesterday:

The Supreme Court is wrapping up its term, and it’s expected that the court will overturn Roe v. Wade. A draft of Justice Alito’s majority opinion that was leaked early last month would end the federally guaranteed constitutional right to abortion and allow states to write their own abortion laws. This is happening as we approach the 50th anniversary of Roe. We’re going to talk about how we got here and what might happen next.

My guest, Mary Ziegler, has written several books and many articles and op-eds about the debates and battles over abortion. She says overturning Roe isn’t the final goal of the anti-abortion movement. Her new book is called “Dollars For Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement And The Fall Of The Republican Establishment.” It’s about how the anti-abortion movement became a major force within the Republican Party and, in the process, transformed the party, opening the door to insurgents and populists like Donald Trump. Ziegler is a professor of law at the University of California, Davis. 

They talk about privacy and the 14th Amendment.

GROSS: Is overturning Roe like the final destination for the anti-abortion movement? Or are there plans to go beyond that?

ZIEGLER: Oh, there are definitely plans to go beyond it. So I think in the book and in all of my research, it’s quite clear that the anti-abortion movement is a personhood movement. From its inception, the anti-abortion movement was about the idea that there are fundamental rights for unborn children, that unborn children or fetuses have rights to equality under the law, have rights to due process of the law. And that’s the end goal, right? It’s not overturning Roe and allowing states to do whatever they want; it’s instead to require that all states, so progressive as well as conservative states, cannot permit abortion. And it’s also, of course, to prevent as many abortions as possible from happening until that personhood goal is reached.

So overturning Roe, of course, is a major step, but it will neither mean the declaration of personhood nor necessarily a huge decline in the number of abortions if people are allowed to travel out of state. And if states are not punishing women and pregnant people and they can get abortion medications on the internet and if progressive states step up their support for people seeking abortion, financially and otherwise, we may not see that much of a decline in the abortion rate. So I think this battle will continue. And for abortion opponents, this is more the beginning of the story than the end.

There it is – early on in the interview, Ziegler took three opportunities to say “people” when she meant “women.” She kept on doing it, too.

ZIEGLER: Well, I think, obviously, there are going to be the kind of classic, you know, states that disallow abortion and sometimes go to extremes in enforcing those bans, right? So we may see extensive digital surveillance of people of reproductive age. We may see efforts, as we mentioned, to try to prevent interstate travel. We may see efforts to punish pregnant people directly. There’ll be states, of course, very progressive states, that not only allow people in their states to have abortions, but facilitate travel from other states, potentially by providing financial support, by protecting their own physicians against extradition requests or lawsuits.

…

I mean, if you’re thinking about how anyone would know people were having abortions, they would have to be surveying a group of people much broader than those who ultimately would turn out to be seeking abortions.

…

It’s worth noting, too, that it’s not just providers who are facing these consequences potentially in the short term. Some states are also including criminal punishment for people who aid or abet people seeking abortions. So those could be abortion funds and groups that help low-income people pay for abortions. It could be family members who help to pay for abortions.

Three “people” in that para again, but the first one can actually mean people, so I didn’t bold it.

Somewhat to my surprise, Terry Gross did not follow suit.

GROSS: Let’s talk about punishing women who have an abortion. As you’ve pointed out in your writing, you know, in the past, it’s mostly been abortion providers who have been targeted with, you know, any kind of criminal punishment. But now it looks like we’re opening up the possibility in some states of criminalizing women who have abortions. Where do we stand on that?

I wonder if she’s getting any pressure from younger staffers.

Still the Times – sorry it doesn’t provide links for individual pieces the way Guardian Live (for instance) does.

Representative Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri, was seated in the same Planned Parenthood where she chose to have an abortion after an assault, listening to providers and advocates talk about the challenges of their work at a roundtable when her chief of staff passed her a phone. The Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade.

“Sitting in the same place where it was easy to access, and sitting in the same place where those rights were stripped away from people who right now are in the same situation that I was in,” she recalled. “It broke me down. I was just in shock.”

“The thing that I haven’t reconciled in my head is the majority of Americans did not want to see Roe v. Wade overturned,” she said, adding “we have to make it clear that we are not taking this and just saying okay.”

I’m much the same. Like everyone else I knew it was coming of course, but the arrival is still a shock and a disgust and a horror.

Compare and contrast:

Around the world, many governments have been moving toward easier access to abortion, with more than 50 countries liberalizing their laws in the past three decades.

But the US, proud of its unique backwardness, is dashing in the opposite direction.

By contrast, a recent Supreme Court brief filed by abortion providers said that overruling Roe puts “the United States in the company of countries like Poland and Nicaragua as one of only a few countries moving toward greater restrictions on legal access to abortion in the past 20 years.”

Priest-ridden Ireland is better than we are.

When Boris Johnson is better than the US Supreme Court:

Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, characterized the Supreme Court decision as a “big step backward.”

Speaking at a news conference in Kigali, Rwanda, at a meeting of leaders of Commonwealth countries, Mr. Johnson acknowledged that the ruling was from another jurisdiction, but added that “clearly it has massive impacts on people’s thinking around the world. It’s a very important decision.”

“I think it’s a big step backward,” Mr. Johnson said, “I’ve always believed in a woman’s right to choose, and I stick to that view, and that’s why the U.K. has the laws that it does.”

Well not exactly – the UK doesn’t have the laws it does because Johnson sticks to his view. But I think his meaning is that the view, which is widespread, is why the UK has the laws it does.

Of course the view is widespread here too, but thanks to the fact that we have a carefully gerrymandered voting system, the woman-hating view has prevailed in the court.

Next level:

Another speaker—Matt Sande, legislative director of Pro-Life Wisconsin—calls the likely repeal of Roe v. Wade “a great first step,” adding that his group will then work to remove the exception for saving the life of the mother from the 1849 Wisconsin anti-abortion law that could go back into effect if Roe is overturned. “This is a spiritual battle,” he says, urging people to “just pray they stick to this [leaked draft] Alito decision.”

Emphasis mine.

Originally a comment by artymorty on A pivotal moment.

That openness attracts some transgender people who empathize with Ariel’s agony of being trapped in a body that feels wrong.

That’s a euphemistic way of saying there’s a big overlap between crossdressing and roleplaying as a mermaid (or a furry, or something infantile like a child’s doll or even a child in diapers). And I can imagine that mermaid-dom has much of the same problem as furrydom (and babydom and doll-dom and trans-dom): that parents let kids and young people get involved thinking it’s harmless roleplay or some kind of special identity, completely unaware that for a lot of the adults in the group, it’s a highly sexual activity. I’ve read stories of parents dropping their teens off to spend the day unattended at furry conventions, thinking it’s just a bunch enthusiastic fans of various cartoon characters, unaware that such conferences are basically orgies for fetishistic men — no place for young people to be at all. That’s not so different as the stories of 13- and 14-year-old girls joining transgender support groups and finding themselves surrounded by men in their early twenties: for the girls it’s about escaping distress around the reality of living as females; for the men it’s about the sexual thrill of getting into it.

Mermaid-dom is in fact for some people just a particular kind of bondage: it involves the lower half of a woman’s body (often actually a crossdressing man roleplaying as the “woman”) being incapacitated and tightly encased in rubber or latex. In illustrations and photographs widely distributed by mermaid fetishists, the upper half of the body is also bound and gagged with rope and duct tape. There’s often someone with a whip standing nearby — hardly Prince Eric from Disney’s Little Mermaid cartoon. I wonder why that failed to make it into the article?

(Speaking of fetishes for incapacitation and being wrapped in latex: I actually knew someone who died from that. I was at his memorial. No one mentioned the cause of death, which immediately led me to suspect something kinky was involved, and I did a deep google dive and sure enough, he had constructed an elaborate contraption that would completely vacuum seal him in a kind of giant rubber Ziploc bag, leaving him completely unable to move, and dependent on modified mechanical diving contraptions for oxygen. The breathing device malfunctioned, and he suffocated alone in his home inside his homemade fetishistic rubber Ziploc bag while his girlfriend was away in California marketing that very contraption at a fetish convention. I wonder how many mermaids have bought one?)