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 17th 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 19th
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 21st
century, like a woman in the 19th century, has “not the best right
to her own person.”
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Newspapers rarely publish my op-eds (last was in 2019), so I put them here
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