The end of legal abortion in red-state America

Tuesday Talking Points

Roe vs. Wade will soon be no more…

Last night, when Politico circulated a draft copy of an Order from the U.S. Supreme Court that would overturn Roe vs. Wade, my very first question was: "How did they get that???"

Photo by Anna Sullivan on Unsplash

If you're surprised that my first thought wasn't the horror of the end of safe and legal abortions, then you haven't been paying attention to my articles over the past six years that predicted that this day would come; alas, it is regrettably here!

More on that point below… 

But sticking with my initial "how did Politico get the Order question," I find it rather disturbing that the highest court in the United States has a mole that was willing to leak an Order of this magnitude weeks in advance of the typical end of Court term releases. In the past, I’ve seen lower level magistrate and traffic hearing officers with far tighter security than what the Supreme Court has shown this week, and I condemn this leak in the strongest terms as the political acts of someone ( or some persons) within the one branch of the federal government that's supposed to be non-political.  

But who are we kidding; the modern Supreme Court has been hideously political ever since it weighed in on the Florida recount in 2000 and halted what very well could have been an Al Gore victory over George W. Bush. According to a 2013 article in The New Yorker written by court historian Jeffrey Toobin, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was quoted as saying: “Maybe the Court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it (Bush vs. Gore), goodbye,’ ” adding that the case, “stirred up the public” and “gave the Court a less than perfect reputation.”

Indeed…

But let's not kid ourselves into thinking that the Supreme Court, or any court for that matter, isn't led by men and women who are guided by their political positions far more than some noble feelings about what the Framers of the Constitution intended when they signed that document in 1787.

Lest we forget that the Framers were a group of racist (see Slavery and Native American genocide) and sexist (see suppression of white women's rights) white males who primarily cared about furthering the hold of wealthy white men over their so-called "New World." With the foundation of American laws coming from this flawed point of vantage, then it is no surprise that from Dred Scott vs. Missouri to Plessy vs. Ferguson, to Korematsu vs. U.S., to Bush vs. Gore, that the Supreme Court tends to be very political and get it very wrong fairly regularly. 

Ergo, I hold no surprise that the current Supreme Court plans to overturn Roe because I have watched the slow march to this decision since I was a child, back when the so-called Christian "moral majority" introduced the "Right to Life" concept into the American English Lexicon. 

But even the whole "Right to Life” mumbo-jumbo is a sham that's cloaked in religious and moral rhetoric, but is purposed to prevent the browning of America that, in time, will render whites a minority. That’s why I find it appalling when white male conservatives, including Justice Samuel Alito, pretend as if their desire to stop abortion is some attempt to protect Black lives as he reasoned: "Some (abortion) supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population. It is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect. A highly disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses are black.”

The sophistry in Alito's sentence is that Black women, as do Brown women, more often than not have their babies—while many of the self-righteous right to lifers spend their time dismantling social programs that help with lower income mothers of all races who choose life. 

What also angers me is the sheer hypocrisy of conservatives who are giddy that Roe is set to be overturned, despite the fact that many quite likely have 1. Caused an unwanted pregnancy that ended with an abortion; 2. had abortions themselves; 3. taken their wives, girlfriends, mistresses, or daughters to abort pregnancies through their private medical providers. 

That last point, the private medical providers, is what will separate the “have” and “have less” women in the days ahead because not only will the conservative hypocrites still race to their private doctors to get abortions, but those private doctors do not have to report such medical procedures in the way that a community health or Planned Parenthood clinic must report! Thus, well-off pregnant women will discretely terminate their pregnancies as was the custom before Roe was decided in 1973, while many not-so-well-off women will risk their own lives to have medically unsafe terminations in back alleys and backrooms across the country. 

But like my father used to say, "a hard head makes a soft behind," and the political whipping that the Supreme Court is dishing out on this issue was foreseeable and avoidable. Conservatives were just DROOLING for the chance to reverse Roe, and for every abortion rights supporting Democrat or Independent who chose to vote for Donald Trump or some off-brand third, fourth, or fifth party presidential candidate in 2016 because you didn't like Hillary Clinton, well, you should have seen this day coming as Trump didn't even try to hide that he wanted to select justices that would end abortions in America. And he did just that by placing Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett in prime position to join conservatives Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas in a 5-4 majority ruling that ends legal abortion in America for at least the next 30 to 40 years—or more!

What makes me equally frustrated this morning is my knowing that if Supreme Court conservatives rejected their fellow conservative, Chief Justice John Roberts, on the Roe reversal matter (Roberts sided with the Court's liberals), then I can assume that future legal rulings on civil rights, minority voting rights, property rights, and freedom of speech matters all could turn the clock back to the Jim Crow era in future Court sessions. 

God, forbid...