It is so curious how right-wing, Trumpers see mask-wearing mandate for public health as “tyranny” but can’t wait to force women to bear babies, even if her own life is at stake, even if a 15-year old girl was raped by a relative.
But Amy Coney Barrett wants to go further than banning abortion – even non-surgically using medication – and denying a woman’s right to make her own health, reproduction, and family decisions.
She has indicated her inclination to ban contraceptives, fertility procedures like IVF, and I’m betting would oppose any medical research that involved stem cells from fetal material (the “breakthrough” drug cocktail that Trump took for COVID-19 came from fetal material).
And what is next?
Women being prosecuted if they miscarry? Women being forced to isolate, prevented from traveling across state lines when pregnant, as some states have already tried to legislate? That’s what is at the heart of “personhood” – essentially giving a fetus more rights than its mother (and who should decide what that fetus wants? Well the government!)
The U.S. Constitution guarantees religious freedom but specifically bars the “establishment” of religion – what is known as separation of church and state.
That means that Barrett is free to follow her own conscience and religious beliefs for her own life if she opposes abortion, but it does not give her, or the government, the right to impose her religious beliefs on someone else. If government mandated mask-wearing is tyranny, what is denying a woman’s right to control her own body, her own destiny, to have the same ability for self-determination and fulfillment as a man?
It makes the woman a slave of the state, chattel, a broodmare, but not a full, equal citizen, not a full human being, as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued so many years ago.
State actions, like New York State codifying the principles of Roe v. Wade into state law, will not be enough to protect a woman’s dignity, equality, or liberty if the activist regressive justices on the Supreme Court create a new principle of “personhood” – the notion that a fetus has all the rights of a living sentient being even if it is only a cluster of cells.
What, you can’t hear the fetus say whether it wants to live in pain with a prognosis of a very early death? Well, The government will decide on behalf of the fetus.
Wow, makes those mask-wearing mandates make the Nanny State look ridiculous; this is (still) the Daddy State.
Roe v Wade should not have been decided based on the premise of “privacy” and “property”, but on the 14th amendment’s guarantee of Equal Protection. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s (R.I.P.) argument for gender equality stemmed from the same argument for racial equality.
Since RBG first used this argument in 1973, things have improved for women, it is true, but as this latest stolen lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court shows, it is fragile. Barrett said that “Roe” is not “settled” law, because it has always been controversial, thus broadcasting her intent to vote to overturn it at her earliest opportunity.
But consider this: a government that can ban abortion can also mandate abortion (think China).
But it’s not just Equal Protection between women and men. Striking down Roe altogether or giving states the ability to impose extraordinary barriers that effectively overturn a woman’s right to choose means that women in some states, and women in certain economic and social strata will have more rights than others by their sheer ability to travel to obtain an abortion. It is the same as why the Supreme Court realized that Marriage Equality needed to be federal and not left up to individual states.
Someone tweeted back at me during the Senate confirmation hearing for Amy Coney Barrett, who insists she is an “originalist” and only interprets law based on the original intent of the Founding Fathers (as if that can be divined) that “abortion” is not in the Constitution.
Well, the framework for the entire nation contains only 4,500 words and none of them are “freedom,” “God” or “women” (but it does contain the words “Post Offices and Post Roads”).
Indeed, the newly formed states were so wary of a new tyranny that a Bill of Rights had to be added (originally 12), and even that was forged in compromise and had to be amended and added to multiple times. “Originalism” is the biggest judicial fraud ever concocted.
Trump’s Supreme Court-packing with ultra-conservative, undemocratic justices who conveniently “divine” what the founding Fathers were thinking according to their own political sensibilities and expediencies and who is occupying the Oval Office, means that the Equal Rights Amendment is more important than ever.
When Democrats take back the Senate, the House and the White House, they need to pass a law extending the validity of the state votes on the ERA, since Virginia just became the 38th state, and the last one needed to ratify, and then adopt it into the Constitution.
But this is all the more reason a Blue wave must sweep Joe Biden into the White House with overwhelming margins and the Democrats in control of the Senate, so that through law-making, versus judicial fiat, we restore health care, environmental protection, voting rights, women’s rights, civil rights and equal protection under the law. And yes, if necessary, expand the court to restore balance and justice.
Women, who came out by the millions the day after Trump’s inauguration, again took the streets of Washington and other cities in the final days before Election Day. “It’s not hyperbole to say everything is on the line,” one said.
