Roe V. Hate

I'm sure you've all heard about the leaked draft majority opinion of the Supreme Court of America. "We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled," is its conclusion; this short post is about the implications for abortion rights, but also what it says about our times, the GOP and right-wing politics.

The Republican president who's seen as maybe the worst president in the history of the United States, Donald Trump, has achieved the party's biggest win in decades by having justices for the Supreme Court voted in under his watch. A Supreme Court Justice is assigned for life, and by ensuring a right-wing conservative majority in the Supreme Court, the GOP has won decades of right-wing bias in the highest court of the land. One prize conservatives have sought after for a half century is the abolition of abortion rights. Under the guise of fighting for the rights of the unborn child they've fought against women's right to choose whether or not to carry pregnancy to its end. What they've fought for is mandatory child-bearing, birth under duress, reducing women to involuntary recreation-vessels.

They care not for the unborn child. Conservatives are conservatives because they feel deeply about traditional power hierarchies, and one of the oldest is the power of men over women. People forget that "marriage" was originally a cold transaction between a man and another man, the father of the bride; the man would ask for his daughter's hand, sometimes present the father with a dowry, thereby literally buying the daughter, who would then become the young man's property. In Christianity, the predominant religion among western conservatives, women are forbidden to hold positions of power. In the Bible Eve caused Adam and the rest of humanity to suffer under "original sin" after foolishly falling for the ruse of a talking snake; even the original woman was a gullible trouble-maker who was to be closely supervised...

And that's what this is about. If Republicans would really care about children and babies being born healthy, they'd support child-care and prenatal care. If they'd care about the children growing up in a nuclear family with two parents, they'd make sure that each birth is the result of a conscious choice by providing contraceptives. They do not support any of that, but pretend to care about a clump of cells that may or may not become a child. They do not care, I can't stress that enough. It's all about their precious hierarchies, it always has been.

The leaked document was obtained by "Politico" who published their article on 2 May 2022 titled Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows. Follow the link and read the article if you're interested. In December 2021 there was already a meeting held among the justices to hear "oral arguments" in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a case concerning the constitutionality of Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In that case the much debated norm of "viability" was once again questioned; you can listen to that whole shit-show right here.

Here are the opening paragraphs of the Politico article:

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision — Planned Parenthood v. Casey — that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
_{source: Politico}

The draft is very clear, but we must remember that it is just a draw, that it's still possible that opinions among the justices change, although I wouldn't hold my breath. If it stands and Roe v. Wade is indeed overruled in two months time, it means a set-back, a reversal back in time, a loss for women's rights. Women gained the right to abortion in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. Did you know that only a year later they were equally able to have their own bank-account, without their husband's signature?

In the 1960s women gained the right to open a bank account. Shortly after, in 1974, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed which was supposed to prohibit credit discrimination on the basis of gender. Before its passage, many banks granted credit cards to women only with their husbands' signatures and outright refused to issue them to unmarried women.
_{source: The History of Women and Money in the United States in Honor of Women’s History Month}

I've often written about the rise of proto-fascism in the west, and how it's characterized by a return to a non-existing mythologized past and a strong adherence to strict hierarchies; this case is just one of many signs that we're in a downward spiral. I must leave it here, as I'm pressed for time today, but please watch the below linked video.

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