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My Body My Choice sign
We had two months warning the lawless new rightwing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court intended to destroy the Constitutional right of women to control their own lives that has been guaranteed for a half-century.
But that didn’t make the grim reality any less shocking when the court’s outrageous 6-3 decision overturning Roe v. Wade suddenly shut down women’s health clinics in Wisconsin and around the country preventing women from ending unwanted pregnancies.
Most pregnant American women have never lived in a country where politicians could force them to carry every pregnancy for nine months and give birth while those same politicians destroy safe, legal alternatives. They do now.
The vicious new supermajority on the court eliminated all constitutional protections for women to allow state legislatures to restrict or completely abolish abortion even in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother.
Curtailing Women’s Rights
The three dissenting Democratic court appointees who still support women’s rights and the Constitution—Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan—accurately described the decision. “Whatever the exact scope of the coming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens … As of today, this court holds, a state can always force a woman to give birth, prohibiting even the earliest abortions.”
The majority claimed “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start” in 1973 when a Nixon Republican court declared a woman’s right to choose whether to give birth was an essential constitutional right in our democracy. Their lame rationale: Abortion rights weren’t mentioned when the 14th Amendment passed in 1868 enumerating rights of “life, liberty and property” states couldn’t violate without due process.
The dissenting justices easily batted that down. Because women had no citizenship rights in 1868, they wrote: “‘People’ did not ratify the 14th Amendment. Men did.” It was no surprise those guys “were not perfectly attuned to the importance of reproductive rights for women’s liberty.”
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The Good Old Days?
But, of course, restoring the 1800s when women and people of color had few rights in America is exactly what Republicans have in mind. The radicalized new court is a direct result of three new justices appointed by the disastrous one-term Republican president who attempted to violently overthrow American democracy.
Clarence Thomas, the court’s most extreme rightwing justice, even listed all the human rights he’s eager to wipe out next—destroying LGBTQ rights including marriage equality, controlling what consenting adults do in their bedrooms and one that’s totally illogical for abortion opponents, outlawing access to contraceptives to prevent pregnancy.
Widespread availability of contraceptives has prevented far more abortions than the anti-abortion movement. But the rightwing agenda has never made any sense. The second most unpopular decision by this self-proclaimed pro-life Supreme Court in this era of mass shootings allows Americans to carry concealed weapons into crowded public places.
Americans vs. Supreme Court
It’s getting harder to convince people these days that democracy is not already doomed but let me try. Most Americans are opposed to the radical Republican court’s rightwing destruction of democracy’s fundamental values of freedom and equality.
That was documented in Marquette University Law School’s most recent poll on state support for abortion rights. Only 35% said abortion should be illegal in all or most cases while 58% said abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
Many Americans think we’re evenly divided politically. We’re not. We’re more like a 33-33-33 country. Only about a third are the violent, hard-core rightwing haters Donald Trump incited against America. Another third are progressive activists fully aware of violent threat to democracy from those Trumped-Up Republicans. The third caught in the middle are depressed by all the chaos around them but feel helpless to stop it because “it’s just politics.”
They’re right it’s all politics, but they aren’t helpless. Despite Republican voter suppression, they still have the right to vote. The rightwing Supreme Court’s destruction of women’s rights, ending freedom for the majority of the population, has now produced enough righteous anger among women and every man who cares about the women in his life to unite the two-thirds of Americans who still support democracy.
“This fall Roe is on the ballot,” President Biden said Friday leading the fight. “Personal freedoms are on the ballot. The right to privacy, liberty, equality — they’re all on the ballot. . . . This decision must not be the final word.”
Wisconsin voters have a key role to play statewide and nationally. They have to re-elect Gov. Tony Evers and Atty. Gen. Josh Kaul to stop Republicans running for those offices from joining the permanently gerrymandered Republican legislature to reinstate an 1849 law criminalizing abortion.
Wisconsin also needs to replace its embarrassing Sen. Ron Johnson with a Democrat ready to end the Senate filibuster and codify Roe’s protections restoring women’s rights over their own lives into federal law.
