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Roe v. Wade headline over US constitution
The drastic scope of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s vicious first draft of the court’s majority decision destroying the Constitutional right of women to control their own lives guaranteed for a half-century is still sending shockwaves through the nation.
It’s shouldn’t. Rightwing Republicans have never made any secret of their intention to abolish the Constitutional right established 49 years ago by Roe v. Wade allowing women to participate fully and equally in America’s democracy making their own family, health care, economic and life decisions.
Most women who become pregnant have never lived in America when politicians could force them to carry every pregnancy for nine months and give birth without any safe, legal alternatives. That’s why Alito’s first draft sounds like something written by an American version of the Taliban in a brutal undemocratic society without any protection for human rights. Because it is.
Here’s why.
It’s a religious decision that destroys religious freedom in America. The 1st Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion for all Americans. Any American who believes life begins at conception has a right to act on their personal religious beliefs. No one can pass any law preventing them from carrying every pregnancy to term.
But here’s what those Americans don’t have a right to do in a democracy. They can’t write their own religious beliefs into federal and state laws and impose them on other Americans with different religious beliefs.
Alito’s central premise to justify overruling both Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood, the two Supreme Court precedents upholding abortion rights, is flat-out wrong. Here’s Alito: “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision …”
This a rhetorical trick created by the modern-day rightwing movement. Extreme rightwing Justice Antonin Scalia called it “originalism,” attempting to freeze democracy under our Constitution to the archaic language and times of our founding “fathers.” Conveniently, that’s when wealthy white males owning property were the only ones with any explicitly guaranteed rights.
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The second part of Alito’s sentence is a lie. Throughout our history, Supreme Courts have expanded the concept of democracy to extend equal rights and equal treatment under the law and protections against discrimination to all Americans including women, people of color and most recently LGBTQ individuals.
The word “abortion” may not have existed when the Constitution was written, but that doesn’t suddenly mean the legal rights of women first guaranteed by a Republican-majority Nixon court in 1973 with Roe and reaffirmed and strengthened by a Republican Reagan court in 1993 in Casey v. Planned Parenthood are suddenly null and void.
The lies under oath by Trump appointees about to strike down Roe who pretended to respect Roe as settled precedentare topped by Alito’s absurd lie that overturning women’s rights doesn’t threaten any other rights. “We emphasize that our decision concerns the Constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”
Just the opposite is true. If five radical rightwing justices can destroy a half-century of Constitutional protection for the right of every woman in America to make her own decisions shaping her life, no other right in our democracy is safe.
In fact, Republicans recognizing the radical Trump majority’s eagerness to overturn precedent are already discussing new cases to bring to the court to reopen previously settled issues including contraception, same-sex marriage and other LGBTQ rights, interracial marriage and further destruction of voting rights for Black and brown Americans.
Alito and the new Trump court majority doesn’t care that most Americans oppose their destruction of the Constitutional right of women to control their own lives. “We cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work,” Alito arrogantly concluded.
That’s a description of a totalitarian state ruled by a ruthless minority at the top with unchecked power, not a democracy. The violent insurrection Trump unleashed against the U.S. Capitol was just a distraction. Trump and Republican Leader Mitch McConnell had already destroyed democracy by adding three new Republicans to the court eager to rewrite the Constitution.
Since 1975, polls by Gallup have found only 19% to 21% of Americans who support outlawing all abortions, eliminating even exceptions to protect the life of the mother or young children raped by sexual predators in their own homes. That’s cruel and inhuman. But the Supreme Court is ready to authorize that everywhere in America Republicans have unchecked power.
If Americans want their democracy back, they have to turn out in record numbers again in November and in every other election to elect more Democrats who want to protect the Constitutional rights of Americans and defeat Republicans who don’t.
