How we got here. What is at stake today in the SCOTUS
All of the advances that women have made in the last 50 years actually will go away if the Right Wing gets what they want out of this court.
How, you ask? Because anti-choice is, at first and last, anti-woman, and that means all our choices are in the mix. Contraception, birth control, welfare assistance, childcare, parental leave, jobs and career advancement — all of it.
They’ve been laying the social groundwork forever by redefining the most popular and effective contraceptives as abortifacients. They’ve been lying to teenagers for decades, saying condoms are completely ineffective against both disease and pregnancy.
They’ve laid legal groundwork by making sure that the US Congress inserted “conscience clauses” into every piece of health legislation — so that employers/insurers, hospitals, doctors and pharmacists all have a legal out for not only refusing to provide for abortions but for refusing to cover/provide Plan B, Morning After, contraceptive pills and contraceptive devices. The Hyde Amendment was introduced as a compromise, and somehow it has never gone away.
Legal groundwork at the state level has included “personhood” laws, and when that was too direct they did an end-run by defining the murder of a pregnant woman as a double-homicide. They’ve intruded on the health crisis that is addiction, not by providing support to beat the addiction but by imprisoning pregnant women for endangering their fetuses. They’ve worked to broaden the definition of what endangers a fetus — where there is a miscarriage, there must be a woman at fault.
Are you beginning to get the picture now?
It goes further. When Roe vs Wade was decided, it superseded state laws — but state legislatures saw no need to actually remove those old laws from the books. It may have been lazy thinking at the time, but at some point someone realized that if Roe goes away, the old laws come back automatically unless they have since been overturned by the state — and by that time the culture wars were in full swing.
They have been relentless, in part because Gawd is on their side and in part because women are just too uppity for their own good, but hey, same thing in the end. When one legislative maneuver fails, they try another in a different state, then return and try again.
That’s all I can say for now. There’s so much more.
I was in college when Roe became law. I was glad, and at the same time conflicted. At some point I came to understand that the anti-abortion hysteria was not all about nasty entitled women aborting fully-formed adorable Gerber babies (as the RW likes to portray the situation, thus trying to make every one of us ashamed to speak out in support of abortion), but it was truly about contraception and the ability to prevent pregnancy in the first place. And contraception is foundational to absolutely every advance we women have made in the last century. That’s where we are going.
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