Kate Riga at TPM has a piece up that addresses anti-choice people’s puzzlement at the wingnut SCOTUS supermajority’s failure so far to mount a full-scale attack on reproductive rights. They’re particular confused and disconcerted by Bony Carrot’s failure to strike down Rowe vs. Wade:
When Justice Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the Supreme Court in October 2020, the anti-abortion community celebrated the beginning of a new era. The Court would now be heavily skewed to the right, and its newest member had been open about her own beliefs.
“It’s go time! Get ready for a post Roe v Wade America! #ProLifeGen Assemble! This is what we were made for and have been preparing for,” tweeted the president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life.
That was six months ago. The hammer still hasn’t dropped.
Riga notes that the lack of action so far doesn’t necessarily mean a damn thing; the Court could take up the listed case on Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks “this week.”
But there’s all kinds of speculation swirling about the delay. Folks interviewed for Riga’s piece gave possible reasons, including that the Court is planning to deny review of the Mississippi petition and is delaying that announcement until a dissent is prepared, to the possibility that Justice Breyer plans to retire at the end of the term (and a subsequent confirmation circus), to the Court wanting to kick the can down the road until the end of the term, to the Court being generally reluctant to fuck with the status quo right now.
My cynical side wonders if the Republican Justices (because that is what they are) are leery of giving Democrats any ammunition for the midterms, trusting that their voters will swallow their disappointment and turn out in greater numbers than ours will. That’s usually a safe bet, but who knows?
Senator Markey and Congressman Nadler introduced a bill to raise the number of justices from 9 to 13, which would be great, but it has no chance in hell of passing the in the current U.S. Congress. Maybe their gambit is about 2022 congressional races too. Again, who knows?
Open thread!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Simpler than that; those conservative Justices mission is to protect corporate citizenship and over turning Row v Wade would give the Democrats the mandate to pack the court with Liberals who would do that in.
Baud
Lots of different reasons for the delay. Let them fret, but we should assume Roe is gone until we hear otherwise.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’ve always thought Roberts and Gorsuch as very political animals. Maybe Kavanaugh– whose rage was in part performative, the Audience of One wanted to see fight, and the howler monkeys respond to it too– and even Barrett are more political than we, at least I, thought too. I think Alito and Thomas are more ideological, but probably susceptible to sweet talk from Roberts.
IANAL, but isn’t Roberts known for dropping time bombs into seemingly less conservative opinions? phrasing and guidance for future lawsuits to activists to let them know how they can win a majority in a future suit ?
laura
Post Roe v Wade America would sure have a lot of Becky Bells, so there’s that. IMO, the Robert’s Court will cynically leave Roe but encourage the lower court’s to keep interfering with reproductive rights and women’s agency because they hate women as an organizing principle. Agree that the Court expansion should occur but won’t until a recommendation is made to legitimately provide a basis for doing so – and there’s plenty of reasons to do so for judicial economy and the far too long delays for final adjudication at the federal level. Also, Robert’s is using the shadow docket to do his dirty work. Finally, John Roberts cares more about his reputation than justice, and so will keep the headlong rush to Lochner II at a more leisurely pace unless the GOP gets back in the majority.
James E Powell
@Baud:
I don’t expect them to overrule it, but rather shred it into pieces
The many polls that show the majority support choice, do not match election results. People who say they are pro-choice will vote for Republicans, sometimes in large numbers. People who are anti-abortion will almost never vote for a Democrat.
stacib
I seriously wonder why all of the pro-life folks are so willing to vote against every social program that would / could help sustain these same lives. Do lives have less value once they are out of the womb?
sdhays
IF there actually is a hesitancy, and that’s far from a given, I think there very well may be a concern that if they do something as big and sweeping as pull the trigger on Roe vs. Wade, they may provide Democrats the consensus they currently lack regarding reforming the Court. If Republicans held at least one chamber of the Court, they might feel like they could ride it out.
Baud
@James E Powell:
If they don’t overrule it, the red states will keep imposing more and more restrictions, and the courts will at some point have to either strike those down or overrule Roe formally. But it could be a drawn out process.
Brachiator
My totally unsubstantiated speculation is that Roberts has his eye on history and wants the Conservatives to slow their roll. But I also think that Amy Simpleton McJustice and the other right wing justices are gearing up for a slew of “originalist” reversals of tons of opinions.
Anonymous At Work
Republicans smart and elite enough to make it to the Supreme Court were never ever going to overturn Roe v. Wade. They were only planning to hollow it out. Slice away protections slowly, so there’d be no pushback. In the meantime, Trumpsters and American Taliban pushing for an immediate overturn is the thing that Roberts and the other Republicans DON’T want to see. Hard to talk “respect for precedent” when they overturn precedent set 2-3 years ago under Kennedy, and harder to keep the media from “both side”ing the argument.
They’ll pass on Mississippi and take up a few minor restriction cases and play around with the standard of review for a couple of turns and then revisit admitting privileges in a state like Wyoming or Montana with a small and spread out population, where the only major hospitals are public academic places with a Board of Directors entirely appointed by the Republican governor.
James E Powell
@Baud:
I’m thinking it’s like how they’ve never overruled Mapp.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: There have being cases in the past that have been rendered dead letter without being formally overruled.
Baud
@James E Powell: @Omnes Omnibus:
If a red state says all abortions are illegal, and starts prosecuting people, the courts will have to say yea or nay. It’s harder to distinguish based on the facts.
Citizen Alan
@stacib: YES! I have never met an anti-choice person who, if you engage them in conversation for long enough, will not also eventually admit that they’re opposed to providing any government assistance for people (especially women) who have more children than they can afford because “I shouldn’t have to pay for other people’s mistakes.” IOW, every fucking one of them believes that unwanted children should be brought into the world for the sole purpose of punishing their parents for not being celibate.
Citizen Alan
@sdhays: Personally, I think they’re waiting for the mid-terms. If the Dems lose either the House or the Senate, they’ll go berserk in 2023.
laura
@Citizen Alan: it’s not “the parents” it’s the slutty, slutty woman who must be punished for her sexual activity.
pat
Don’t forget most of the anti-abortion nutcases are also against birth control.
I really hate these people.
lowtechcyclist
Two things: one, this is probably a warning shot across the bow of the conservative SCOTUS majority.
Two, this doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell now. But just a few years ago, dismantling the filibuster didn’t stand a chance in hell either, and right now we’re only a few votes away. Fifteen years ago, it still seemed crazy talk to make an issue of marijuana legalization, yet here we are.
When something’s been the way it’s been forever and a day, you don’t go from zero to overturning it in a heartbeat. First you’ve got to get people to realize and accept that it could be done, then you’ve got to build the constituency for actually doing it. Then if you’re lucky, step three is you succeed in changing it. This is the beginning of step 1 (though step 2 has already started too).
cope
Republican appointed SC justices have had a majority for something like 50 years and Roe still stands. You have to wonder if they are really willing to overturn Roe and throw it all back onto the states where the battle will get really, shall we say, “intense”.
What seems important to me is that the single issue anti-choice voters may eventually see that the national Republican Party has been stringing them along in order to get votes for Republicans to enact the meat and potatoes issues listed by William T. Cavanaugh in “America: The Jesuit Review” in the fall of last year, to wit: “…cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy, increasing military spending, cutting food stamps and other safety net programs, eliminating limits on election spending by corporations, gutting environmental protection laws, maintaining a preferential option for nationalism over refugees and immigrants, supporting the easy availability of assault weapons, keeping health care a largely private and for-profit industry, greenlighting the Contras, the Iraq War, torture, the death penalty and a host of other policies…”.
It really has surprised me over the decades of Republican rule that Roe still stands. There must be a reason for that.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Agree. Revolution Now thinking hurts us long term.
Redshift
They’ve been getting passionate support from “single-issue” anti-abortion voters for four decades by not overturning it and telling them it’s somehow the fault of the Democrats, so why wouldn’t that continue to work?
Betty Cracker
@Anonymous At Work:
Maybe, but Barrett sure seems like a true believer. I suppose the SCOTUS Republicans could work as a bloc to uphold the law while weakening it and allow Barrett to write a fiery dissent advocating striking it down altogether.
If wingnuts are to be believed (which they’re generally not, IMO), abortion is THE single most important issue. They can whittle abortion access down to nothing in a practical sense — already have in many places — but are they 100% confident the true believers will accept anything less than total victory?
MisterForkbeard
@cope:
This is true, but we’re at 6-3 right now with 4 of the conservatives as blatant partisan animals. Roberts is extremely partisan but has thinks about how things will look in the long term, and Gorsuch appears to have actual (wacky) principles and legal theories.
But we’re at a point now we haven’t been before, where the conservatives justices will overturn things because they don’t care about precedent or reasoning, just outcomes
ETA: I fully expect the fig leaf here is that they won’t overturn RvW, but will instead make several decisions that effectively repeal it without explicitly doing so.
Betty Cracker
@Redshift: Maybe they can only blame Dems and rogue Republican justices for so long before even their dumbest supporters start to say, hey, wait a minute?
Riga’s article gives a flavor of that — Bony Carrot was foisted upon us mere months ago, and anti-choicers are already getting big mad that she hasn’t fulfilled their dream.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
It is easy and satisfying to think your opponents are stupid, because they don’t agree with you. In the case of the right-wing Supremes, I don’t think that is true. IMHO, I agree with others that they are going to go one of two directions with this: 1) Wait until after the mid-terms, when the GOP believes they will take the House before overturning Roe, 2) Hollow out Roe, so that abortion in red states is practically banned.
Le Nettoyeur
@lowtechcyclist: Our side has discovered that they too can move the Overton Window, but to the left. Gay marriage is now established. The white GQP is in a state of colonial insecurity as they head to minority status and has been reduced to making openly white supremacist arguments about voting rights (and everything else). and are even attacking Big Business and the Free Market. At some point, it will dawn on even these benighted souls that if they make access to birth control and abortion difficult, the browning of America will actually accelerate. (That is one reason why the old Poppy Bush wing of the GOP was pro Planned Parenthood).
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Betty Cracker:
She is. But she is a canny one. If they go too far too fast, the backlash could undo everything the anti-abortion movement has worked for. Its smarter to treat the blue states as lost causes and shore up abortion bans in the red states. The fanatics won’t like it, but that is much easier to maintain in the long run.
Mike S
Meanwhile Arizona has made it mandatory that parents opt IN for lessons on lgbtqa… and hiv/aids lessons. I wonder how many of those parents would rather have their children die than have their neighbors find out they’ve opted in for the classes.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
okay, this was unexpected. Pat Fucking Robertson: “I support police…” but
Derek Chauvin “they oughta put him under the jail”
PJ
@lowtechcyclist:
Six months from now (or thereabouts), Biden’s panel on judicial reform will have delivered its report. I don’t know what it’s going to say, but it definitely will not say that the status quo is acceptable. With that as a baseline, I think we will see some serious movement towards expanding lower courts, at a minimum, if not the S. Ct., and we will see all the arguments in favor of reform next year, so that it is on the mind of voters in November 2022.
Soprano2
Yes. It’s not those lives they really care about; it’s all about controlling young women’s sex lives. They think they can drive us all back to the 1950’s, when women were terrified of getting pregnant and they believe everyone waited until after marriage to have sex. When you realize what it’s actually about, the things they do make a lot more sense. Like doing literally nothing that would actually prevent abortions, like advocating for better sex ed or better, more easily available birth control. They aren’t interested in preventing unwanted pregnancies – they’re interested in preventing “unapproved” sexual activity by young women.
Betty Cracker
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: That’s the consensus, which seems to assume anti-choice fanatics are infinitely patient and content with lowkey victories rather than a total rout. And maybe they are. I’m not so sure about that, since patience and forbearance seem antithetical to fanaticism. We shall see!
Doc Sardonic
@Betty Cracker: COVID Amy is THE wildcard, being that she is first and foremost a zealot. The Republicans on the SC have been tap dancing on the margins and throwing in a restriction here and there, basically doing the fan dance around overturning Roe. The reason it has never been overturned, in my opinion, is that the politicians at the Federal level, know that as soon as Roe is overturned, there goes their biggest culture war weapon and fundraising workhorse riding off into the sunset. They can’t make the mileage and money off demonizing the LGBTQ community, it is still a potent weapon don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t have the emotional and psychological power of “ the liberals are killing babies”.
Hoodie
@Betty Cracker:
The most plausible explanation for the hesitancy to me goes beyond the slight chance that an outright reversal of Roe will reduce Dem hesitancy to expand the Court before 2022. The GOPremes would rather continue issuing a line of cases where they allow red states to raise increasing procedural obstacles to abortion rights. Oh, they might say they’re waiting for the right case to come along but, in actuality, just about any case would be useable if the purpose is simply to overrule Roe.
Reversing Roe doesn’t give the zealots what they truly want — a national ban on abortion. Even if they reverse Roe, I can’t see Roberts and crew having the stones to rule that a fetus has a right to life under the Constitution (there sure as hell is no originalist or textualist basis for that). A Right to Life amendment will go nowhere. Upshot is that, even with Roe reversed, people of means will always be able to terminate a pregnancy and the zealots will not be satisfied. So the rhetorical and political value of the fight against abortion is far more valuable to the GOP than actually overturning Roe.
Also consider that, if they overturn Roe, the national battle may move to state houses, which may be a fight that the GOP does not want to pick. Dems’ reproductive rights strategy to date has been focused on the Supreme Court, and the Dems’ overall tendency to focus on national elections over state elections often leaves the field open to the GOP to play their other games with gerrymandering and voting rights at the state level.
Coupled with the possibility that directly overruling Roe would give ammo to those wanting to the expand the Court, it’s understandable that they don’t want to pull the trigger. Roe on life support is job security for congressional republicans and the likes of Bony Carrot (love that). They can endlessly spew nonsense about it like they did diagnoses of Terri Schiavo.
evodevo
@stacib: The answer is yes, if I am to believe my right winger friends…a woman is supposed to carry even a deformed/dead baby to term, no matter what (except, of course, if the woman is a member of THEIR family or a mistress or whatever), and after it is born they are supposed to support it without help from anyone…oh, and they keep whining they don’t want to pay for birth control for those slutty sluts, even when you tell them it’s not coming out of their taxpayer pocket….
Now, unsurprisingly, if you closely question, in private, a woman (even a fundie) who was over 21 before Roe v. Wade or The Pill, say back in the Forties and Fifties, you will get a whole ‘nother story…abortion and D&C’s by the family Dr. were quite common, just kept very VERY quiet. The hypocrisy of today’s anti-abortion crowd is over the top, in most cases…
Kent
Honestly repealing Roe would just be one more sign of the growing divide between red and blue states in this country. Right there with the anti-trans laws currently being passed, the refusal to expand medicaid, all the new Jim Crow voting laws, anti-union laws and so forth. There would really be very little effect here on the west coast where abortion rights are enshrined in state law. It would take Congress to actually outlaw abortion for there to be major effects in blue states.
That doesn’t mean we don’t care about Roe. But it is really a symptom of a wider problem and I don’t know what the solution is except another revolution in government on the level of the Civil War to purge red states of their revanchist confederate elements. In other words finish the job of reconstruction. But I don’t see that happening. Maybe only over the long term due to demographics.
In any event, the pro-life movement was never about abortion in the first place. At least to the leaders. It was always about race. It gives them a convenient religious reason to support the most revanchist and racist candidates and policies because of the little babies. Sure there are evangelical rubes who actually believe the BS. But the folks pulling the strings don’t give a shit about abortion. The only care that it is a perfect wedge issue that lets them push other conservative agendas through the door.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
and the horseshoe closes…
Honored to be in dialogue with Steve Bannon.
Doc Sardonic
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Think Dr Wolf may have been kicked in the head by the wearer of the horseshoe.
Steeplejack
@cope:
The dirty secret is that GQP politicians need for Roe not to be overturned. Why would you give up a tool that spurs a
reliablefanatical group of supporters to come out and vote for you in every election because of that one issue, regardless of everything else? Their votes are fungible, in a sense: they are voting against abortion rights, but you bank that vote and “spend” it on whatever you want—lower taxes, reduced regulations, control of the levers of government, personal enrichment, etc. “Sorry, couldn’t get that abortion thing taken care of this time. Damn those Demoncrats! But maybe next time. Send money and remember to vote!”PJ
@Doc Sardonic: That damage happened a long time ago – she was always a nitwit.
hitchhiker
The rending of garments over “the unborn” drives me utterly bananas. These idiots claim to know the Will Of God, and the Will Of God that they know conveniently requires nothing from them — it’s always those other people who need to straighten up their act and make sacrifices.
I had an abortion in the late 70s. Failed birth control. Seven weeks pregnant. Planned Parenthood. Utterly unsuitable for fatherhood partner.
Then in a few years I met and married the person who fathered both my kids. My kids (now in their early 30s) wouldn’t exist if I’d made a different decision. Would never have even met their dad. This means also that my grandchildren wouldn’t exist.
But the garment-renderers cry salty tears over that termination, because it’s the Will Of God that I should have been forced to have that baby and not have the two that came later.
Seriously, fuck them and their phony concern for life.
Steeplejack
@Betty Cracker:
Barrett may mark the point at which the courts start to experience what the legislative branch is well into, i.e., the GQP has been blasting its propaganda for so long that the Republicans coming into office are no longer (merely) manipulators but true believers. The inmates are taking over the asylum.
narya
@lowtechcyclist: This brings to mind marriage equality. When I was a kid, it was difficult to imagine folks being out, much less married to each other–but here we are.
And I think there’s another parallel: part of the way that folks came to support marriage equality is that folks realized they had family members who were gay, that they knew a ton of folks who were gay, and, sure, they should be able to marry. Support for choice I think is similar: the more folks who know someone who made a choice to discontinue a pregnancy, the more folks who realize that reproductive choice includes their contraceptives, the more folks who realize that late-term abortion is typically a terrible tragedy and tortures folks who are already dealing with a terrible situation, the more folks support actual choice.
But I’m probably too hopeful.
Kay
Now that the dog caught the car I wonder if conservatives are finally actually thinking about banning abortion and how profound that might be and how many other radical intrusions into peoples personal lives enforcing a ban would entail, especially since medication abortions are now 40% of early abortions.
In 25-some states, it’s no longer a visit to an “abortion clinic”. It’s a telehealth appointment.
The practical problem with the “pro life” people policing women is where do you draw the line? If abortion is in fact “murder” they can raid your house on probable cause, and if we’re at all logically consistent they have to. They’re imagining they can draw some easy, bright line but they can’t. The reason Roe has stuck around so long is no one ever came up with a better option. It’s hard to navigate and there is nothing comparable. It is unique.
Reap the whirlwind, assholes. People will be begging to put the Roe framework back in place when they see the alternatives.
It’s the incredible hubris that says “smart people agonized over this for decades, but I can fix it with stroke of a pen”. Try it. It’s a nightmarish legal issue and conservatives have been able to avoid the practical ramifications for years because they had Roe as a backstop.
Cameron
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: That’s breathtaking, both the choice of an issue and the choice of an ally.
Redshift
@Soprano2:
Case in point – being against the HPV vaccine because it takes away one reason for women to be afraid of having sex. In any honest definition of “pro-life,” preventing cervical cancer would far outweigh that.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I accept the challenge.
sdhays
@Doc Sardonic: It all comes down to being “against” abortion absolving them of every other horrible thing they believe in. “Sure, I’m totally racist and basically a sadist, but I’m still better than you because ABORTION.”
I don’t believe anyone, at this point, who votes exclusively based on criminalizing abortion actually does so. I don’t believe that if abortion was banned 100% throughout these United States and the pro-choice movement threw up its hands and said “we give up” that these people would change their voting habits. They’re horrible people who use “killing babies” to excuse their horribleness and delude themselves that they have some sort of moral high ground.
Steeplejack
@Doc Sardonic:
Yes, it used to be “Gay marriage—eek!” But that lost its power. So now . . .
Kay
Pro lifers strutting around and crowing that the baby INSIDE is the same as the baby OUTSIDE is fine to say, and it certainly sticks it to the libs, but erase that legal line and see what happens. There’s literally no end to it. They’ll have their head so far up pregnancy they’ll wish they never started.
What Roe really says is simple- it says the state may go this far and no further. Open that up and all bets are off. They’ll be hearing cases on whether a miscarriage was spontaneous or induced. They’ll have to come up with an “intent” standard. They may be wandering in the weeds of reproductive issue cases forever.
hitchhiker
@Kay:
Yes. My question to the “abortion is murder” people has always been, what exactly is your plan?
Among many other issues, are they going to be prepared to follow up on every miscarriage?
Are women really going to be prosecuted for murder? Pharmacists? Drug makers? Nurses?
And what is to be done about the entire IVF industry and those hundreds of thousands of embryos currently waiting to be transferred? Is it murder to destroy them? How are they different from other embryos?
It’s madness.
burnspbesq
@laura:
Bundle the increase in Supreme Court Justices to the former level of one per circuit with a substantial increase in the number of District, Circuit, Court of Federal Claims, Bankruptcy Court, and Bankruptcy Appellate Panel Judges, and you’ve got a non-partisan measure designed for much-needed backlog reduction.
If you wanted to increase the Supreme Court to 15 instead of 13, you could split the Ninth Circuit and create a new specialist circuit, similar to the Federal Circuit, to hear appeals of tax cases—which will skyrocket if Professor Warren gets her wealth tax.The other circuit judges would love that—if you want to see three thoroughly unhappy people, attend oral argument in an appeal of a complex tax case.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: I remember when some campaign event moderator (Tweety maybe?) asked Trump about “punishing” women who have abortions during the campaign, and Trump said “you have to.” That was one of the “where do you draw the line” moments. Trump, who has probably paid for at least half a dozen abortions (maybe with bounced checks), was logically consistent in that moment. But he was also incapable of grasping the politics because he really doesn’t give a shit about the issue, so he had to sort of half-assed walk it back, IIRC.
burnspbesq
The last thing Republicans want is for Roe to be overruled. Cynical, empty promises to overrule it have been one of their most potent fundraising tools for half a century.
Kay
@hitchhiker:
It’s easy to say that medical model they used in Roe, the three tiers, is a bad decision, but try it.
Weight those three sets of rights and come up with something better. Good luck.
There’s this idea that there’s endless ways to do this, but there really isn’t. There has to be line. They used the medical model because the other models are “my religion says”. The statutes won’t have that luxury. They’ll have to codify all of it and that’s just the first draft. There will be case law. Case after case after case. Roe has allowed us not to deal with any of the practicalities or ramifications of this- it just says “you can’t go there“.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Betty Cracker:
Yup. It’s actually kind of interesting to watch the conflicting impulses in trump’s brain play against each other: The self-preservation instinct, the desire to play pundit on The Shows (which is what he really wanted to do) and the awareness of the need to pander to people he holds in two or three different kinds of contempt.
rmjohnston
ACB isn’t a let-the-states-do-their-own-thing-on-abortion type; she’s more of a the-Constitution-requires-all-abortion-to-be-treated-as-murder type who would strike down the law for failing to be restrictive enough. If one of the five remaining Republican justices wants to strike down the law under Planned Parenthood v. Casey (Casey, despite claiming otherwise in the plurality opinion, clearly overruled Roe v. Wade and we should stop pretending otherwise), that means there’s no potential majority ruling despite five votes to strike the law down, but the Court also lacks the votes to rescind certiorari. Until a potential majority coalesces, there’s not much point in scheduling further action.
There are other possible reasons for kicking the can down the road, but I don’t know there are other possible reasons that would require kicking the can down the road.
Mike in NC
It boggles the mind that in a rich country with 330 million people, one crackpot justice could screw with millions of lives.
burnspbesq
As a Catholic, I’m here to tell you that there are too damn many Catholics on the Supreme Court.
Doc Sardonic
@sdhays: I only slightly disagree on one point.
It won’t change their party choice or the reflex to pick the odious culture war politician, but it will change their voting numbers because they won the great “Victory” for God. So the Forced birth contingent doesn’t need to vote anymore and revving them up for some of the rest of the culture war is a heavier lift.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
How can you NOT punish them? It’s “murder!” but only sort of? They get around it with the state statutes by essentially making the woman disappear- she’s just gone in these laws, it’s the “fetus” and “providers”, but that doesn’t make any fucking sense and it isn’t going to work.
These people glibly toss off things like redefining what a “person” is. Do they think it’s just a word? It’s the entire grounding of the whole legal system. Tell me the legal scheme that works to regulate “a person” inside another person while recognizing the agency and personhood of the woman. It can’t be done. One set of rights has to trump.
Mike in NC
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I don’t think it was Tweety, but it was amazing for a notorious sexual predator to say something like that. Then when people pushed back, the Orange Clown had five different opinions on the subject, and the media let him get away with it.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
Years ago, I may have been a child, I have a weird memory, there was a anti abortion ad with a playground with an empty swing. Creak, creak, you get the picture. It was like “abortion ends a life” –
What was wrong with that approach? Why not put all your energy into trying to persuade women not to have them? We radically reduced teen pregnancy in this country and we did it without new laws. Make it a public health issue- it will be the only one the Right has so they can finally have one.
lofgren
They were always just using the abortion issue to confirm judges that would restore Jim Crow and segregation. They were able to pretend this wasn’t so by claiming they didn’t have the votes to do something about abortion. Now the kayfabe is slipping. The good news (for them) is we’ve become so acclimated to the return of segregation and Jim Crow that they will probably be able to be straight up honest about their intent next election cycle, and they can stop talking about abortion entirely.
LongHairedWeirdo
Thinking about turnout is a double edged sword. It’s kind of like the Georgia runoffs.
If they ignore the entire concept of stare decisis, and forever forswear any right to be called “conservative” or in favor of “small government”, and strike down RvW, Democrats have a strong message in the midterms, including any nastiness soi disant “pro life” groups throw around in their glee. “RightWingNutCaseGroup wants women who have abortions to be murdered by the state for their choice. Why hasn’t (Gone Oligarchy Party candidate) condemned them?”
If they don’t, there’ll be yet *another* sense of betrayal, compounded by the people going to jail who, remember, according to Republicans, weren’t patriotic, weren’t fighting for what they thought was right, weren’t trying to correct an injustice, etc., they were just plain criminals. That could crush RW enthusiasm.
H.E.Wolf
Yep.
https://joycearthur.com/abortion/the-only-moral-abortion-is-my-abortion/
AM in NC
@hitchhiker: Yep to all of this. Having had a miscarriage and a subsequent D&E to remove the fetus so I didn’t spontaneously abort while, say, driving my car, I would Looooooooooooove to hear what these people have to say about allowing D&Es in this situation. Are they going to force all women to “naturally” miscarry the fetus because a D&E is a D&E and “who can tell whether the fetus was alive or not at the time of the procedure, so we have to ban ’em all”?
And the IVF question is HUGE. If an embryo is protected life, then good-bye IVF, period. I’d love to see how the zealots handle millions of women who have miscarried or want to use IVF to get pregnant going after them hammer and tongs. I am so fucking pissed about this I can hardly stand it. And I am now beyond being able to get pregnant, so it is no longer personal to my situation at this point. My mom is raging too, and she’s in her 70s.
Bluegirlfromwyo
@stacib: I don’t think anyone who’s lived through the last 13 months needs to wonder if self-proclaimed pro-lifers care about life outside the womb. Pretty clear the answer’s a resounding no. Especially if caring means any inconvenience to them.
J R in WV
My wife is in her 70s and froths at the mouth about the RWNJs and their attitudes about health care and women.
Hospitals with “religious” beliefs against common standards or care? Crazy stuff, allowing a woman to die lest they commit the abortion sin?
Ireland let it go that far with a dead fetus in a young woman, whom they let die right there in the hospital~!!~ Then the outraged Irish people voted all the Catholic restrictions out, now one of the more progressive nations as far as women and health care goes! There were a ton of other problems with the Irish Catholic church, and all of them have been fixed by taking all moral authority away from the Irish Catholic church.
Nora
@Steeplejack: You’re right there, I’m afraid. I’ve told the story before, but my mother, who was a liberal to the core, actually told me she was going to vote for Romney and Ryan because they were “pro-life.” I talked to her about Ryan’s hideous budget which was balanced on the backs of the poor and the neediest, which I KNEW she found repulsive, and about other things the Republicans stood for, but the Church told her abortion was the number one issue, and that’s why she voted the way she did. I wasn’t half as angry at her as I was at the Catholic Church, which ignored all the principles of justice and morality to concentrate only on abortion. My mom’s been dead for six years and I’m STILL furious about that.