Dobbs, Witchcraft and Elizabeth Cady Stanton

 Dobbs, Witchcraft and Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which eliminates abortion as a right, and subjects it to felonious penalty by the states, is a tenebrous chop with the finality of a guillotine.  It is a reckless imperious, fallacious murder of national stability by black-robed agents of despotism.  Forty-nine years of legal abortion, reinforced by stare decisis, have been sacrificed to the flames of biased legalese, a hack job of might-makes-right disguised as logical and cerebral. 

Not only does this indelible historical debacle thumb its nose at the bipartisan judges--five Republicans and two Democrats--who voted for Roe v Wade in 1973, it undercuts the jurisprudential circumspection necessary for a legitimate republic, a government by and for the people that draws on the rationalism of the Founders, not the reactionism of theocracy. 

The quality of the Court’s argument is horrific.  Justice Alito, writing for the majority, cherry-picks from history, landing blinkered on the period surrounding 1868, while ignoring colonial and early colonial America, when abortion was widely accepted until ‘quickening’, when the fetus could be felt to move in the womb. 

Aside from the ignorance of the argument, the effects are abhorrent and heart-wrenching.  This ruling sanctions violence, centered on the monitoring and punishment of the female body.  Women’s reproductive organs are to be held hostage by police force.  The major arc of a woman or girl’s life can be commanded into pregnancy, birth, and the consequences of unwanted motherhood--even in cases of rape and incest.  The enforced journey can be traumatic as well as physically taxing.  The rigors of labor can be life-threatening, debilitating, and permanently alter anatomy.

Another aspect involves the very nature of what it means to dwell in community.  In states that outlaw abortion, surveillance could be constant, due to a ubiquitous, fanatic political base.  Neighbors and strangers alike can scrutinize every pregnant, or possibly pregnant, woman or girl as a potential criminal or murderer.  Women who have miscarriages risk mockery, scorn, conviction and jail time.

Justice Alito, to support the decision, references Sir Mathew Hale, a 17^th century judge, who conducted witch trials and condemned women as witches.  It is worth noting that the invasive inspections that will result from Dobbs, along with the scorn, mockery, scrutiny, and incarceration, bare some resemblance to the cruelty inflicted on women accused of witchcraft, who were pilloried, vituperated and physically searched for ‘marks of the devil’.

If a pregnant woman dares seek freedom from the yoke on her uterus, she could die from black-market medical procedure.  Women will die because of Dobbs.

Dobbs has nothing to do with objective interpretation of the Constitution.  It has everything to do with overarching control that turns women into property of the state.  Abortion is not mentioned in the Bible.  Historically and contemporaneously, Christianity has often accepted the practice of abortion. 

The practice was fine with Southern Baptists till around 1980, when anti-abortionism, in service of right-wing evangelicals, became efficacious.  Other religions, as well, are quite present in America’s grand diversity.  However, the five Justices who overturned Roe are deeply entwined with Catholicism.

As much as Dred Scott was a power play for the enslavement of Black people, Dobbs is a power play for physical and mental control of women.  In the 19^th century, women fighting to gain the right to vote compared themselves to slaves.  In 1860, Elizabeth Stanton wrote:

The negro has no name ... He is Cuffy Douglas ... just whose Cuffy he may chance to be.  The woman has no name.  She is Mrs. Richard Roe ... just whose Mrs. she may chance to be ... Cuffy has no legal existence ... Mrs. Roe has no legal existence; she has not the best right to her own person.

Thanks to Dobbs, a woman in the 21^st century, like a woman in the 19^th century, has “not the best right to her own person.”

 

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