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Abortion

The Handmaid’s Tale Just Became Reality

SisterLove
SisterLove
June 29, 2022
4 min
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More I remember meeting Supreme Court Justice Brennan in his chambers at the Supreme Court when I was in law school. With his eyes sparkling brightly, he told me that it was letters from women around the country that inspired his vote and determination for Roe v. Wade. My late-term abortion was traumatic enough when a hole in the stomach of the fetus was discovered. I can not imagine if I would have been forced to carry to full term only to give birth to a dead fetus. I am forever grateful to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Vermont that assisted me with an early abortion. My friend Donna had an ectopic pregnancy and would have been dead if not for her abortion. My mother was forced to do a back alley dangerous abortion in Puerto Rico because abortion was not legal. My daughter is distraught that she and possible children in the future will have less rights than her mother and their grandmother. Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization will go down in history and herstory as a catastrophic Supreme Court decision. I was appalled that Alito, who writes for the majority compares overturning Plessy v. Ferguson which legalized race segregation to the Dobbs decision which overturns Roe v. Wade and permits the restriction of a woman's rights to control her own body. The Dobbs majority completely ignores the Women's rights movement and advances over the last century and recent decades. It completely ignores that it is a matter of healthcare, life, liberty, and privacy for women. The majority opinion refuses to recognize that the clear majority of the US population is in favor of pro-choice. More than two-thirds of Americans are in favor of retaining Roe. One-quarter of American women will have an abortion before the age of 45. The Supreme Court does not mention that this decision is out of step with the rest of the world. Over the past several decades, more than 50 countries throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas have liberalized their abortion laws. Latin American countries have more reproductive rights than the women in the USA. Only the United States, Poland, and Nicaragua have reduced abortion access in the 21st century. Canada has decriminalized abortion at any point in a pregnancy. Most Western European countries impose restrictions on abortion after 12 to 14 weeks, but they often have liberal exceptions to those time limits, including to prevent harm to a woman's physical or mental health. The Court without unanimous support overturns the precedent of two Supreme Court decisions, Roe v. Wade, and Casey v. Planned Parenthood, and more than twenty other cases reaffirming or applying the constitutional right to abortion. There is no change in law or fact that necessitated this drastic, action. As the dissent in Dobbs makes clear, "Casey is a precedent about precedent. It reviewed the same arguments made here in support of overruling Roe, and it found that doing so was not warranted." The Alito decision is stuck in the criminal earlier history of abortion. Women were chattel in this country and could not own property, vote, or obtain a credit card or law license. How far back would these extreme right judges and appointees of Trump go? The dissent points out that, "The majority makes this change based on the question: Did the reproductive right recognized in Roe and Casey exist in "1868, the year when the Fourteenth Amendment was Ratified? ... Those responsible for the original Constitution, including the Fourteenth Amendment, did not perceive women as equals and did not recognize women's rights. When the majority says that we must read our foundational charter as viewed at the time of ratification (except that we may also check it against the Dark Ages), it consigns women to second-class citizenship". The dissent continues, "...our point is different: It is that applications of liberty and equality can evolve while remaining grounded in constitutional principles, constitutional history, and constitutional precedents. Roe and Casey fit neatly into a long line of decisions protecting from government intrusion a wealth of private choices about family matters, child-rearing, intimate relationships, and procreation. ... In the Fourteenth Amendment's terms, it takes away her [a woman's] liberty. In conclusion, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer state "With sorrow - for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection - we dissent." According to the majority of the US Supreme Court, guns have more rights than women over their bodies. The hypocrisy and blatant political nature of the Dobbs decision is clear. In their opinion given on June 23, 2022, forcing New York and other densely populated states to allow more handguns in public and causing more danger to the public, the conservative majority, led by Justice Clarence Thomas, argued that medieval law imposing arms restrictions - specifically, the 1328 Statute of Northampton - "has little bearing on the Second Amendment" because it was "enacted... more than 450 years before the ratification of the Constitution." Yet in their ruling the next day, June 24, 2022 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, setting women's rights back half a century the conservative justices, led by Samuel Alito (who was also in the majority decision) and joined by Thomas, argued precisely the opposite. They justified abortion bans by citing, among others, "Henry de Bracton's 13th-century treatise." That was written circa 1250 and referred to monsters, duels, burning at the stake - and to women as property, "inferior" to men. The moral hypocrisy about helping families and children is noted when considering that, a state-by-state analysis by public health professionals shows that States with the most restrictive abortion policies also continue to invest the least in women's and children's health, as the Dobbs dissent exemplifies. The dissent begins by stating, "For half a

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