Banning abortion was the first step, not the last
They also won't stop with ending privacy rights.
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When the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion smugly declared that “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Alito mocked the dissent’s concern that getting rid of abortion would ultimately imperil things like access to contraception, saying the dissent was “designed to stoke unfounded fear that our decision will imperil those other rights.”
But as anti-choice politicians and activists are now deploying Dobbs to try to roll back decades of law about bodily autonomy, it’s clear the dissent’s fears were quite well-founded.
Conservatives are not going to stop at unwinding the constitutional right to privacy, which underpins things like the right to obtain birth control and the right of same-sex couples to marry. After they destroy the agency of half the population by imposing so-called “fetal personhood” laws, they’re coming for the modern welfare state.
The blueprint
Over at the hard-right Washington Examiner, Conn Carroll, a former comms person for both the Heritage Foundation and Utah Sen. Mike Lee, has a lengthy list of laws he’d like to get rid of — everything from Medicaid to Head Start to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Those laws, he argues, “penalize marriage and encourage alternative family formation.” Carroll’s goals therefore dovetail not only with forced-birth conservatives but also with forced-marriage conservatives.
At its core, what reproductive freedom promises is that people who can get pregnant will be able to fully participate in society rather than being limited in their ambitions. As the liberal justices wrote in their Dobbs dissent, “[y]esterday, the Constitution guaranteed that a woman confronted with an unplanned pregnancy could (within reasonable limits) make her own decision about whether to bear a child, with all the life-transforming consequences that act involves … but no longer.” The dissent also quoted an earlier abortion case, 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, where the Court had held that protecting reproductive freedom also protected "[t]he ability of women to participate equally in (this Nation's] economic and social life." Being forced to carry an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy, the dissenters said, ultimately results in the pregnant person “losing control of their lives.”
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That loss of control is already painfully evident in states that have banned or seriously restricted abortion. A Tennessee lawsuit highlights the horror of being forced to carry a pregnancy to term even when doing so seriously harms the health of the pregnant person. Some of the plaintiffs developed life-threatening infections like sepsis; others were forced to carry their non-viable pregnancies to term. The lead plaintiff, Nicole Blackmon, suffered serious health problems throughout her pregnancy and was informed that her fetus likely had “limb-body-wall complex,” where the organs of the fetus develop outside the fetus’s body and attach to the placenta instead. Blackmon endured 32 hours of labor to give birth to a fetus she knew would be stillborn. She later chose to have a tubal ligation rather than experience another high-risk pregnancy.
In a similar lawsuit in Texas, the lead plaintiff, Amanda Zurawski, had tried for a year and a half to get pregnant and had undergone multiple fertility treatments. Her much-desired pregnancy turned life-threatening when her water broke at 18 weeks, well before a fetus was viable. Only after Zurawski developed sepsis did the hospital agree to induce labor. She ultimately developed a secondary infection and septic shock, landing her in the ICU for several days. The infections, however, scarred her uterus and fallopian tubes so seriously she may not be able to get pregnant in the future.
It’s impossible to overstate how much incidents like this limit the liberty of people who can get pregnant. Rather than treating the pregnant person as a full human being whose health and freedom have meaning, conservatives have substituted the idea of fetal personhood. That notion underpinned the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision banning in vitro fertilization (IVF). Declaring an embryo a person, complete with the same rights as actual people, does not result in a balancing of rights between the pregnant person and the embryo. Rather, as Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern wrote in Slate, “Every unborn fetus is the priority over the pregnant person carrying it and must be carried to term at all costs.”
Fetal personhood laws similar to those in Alabama exist in at least 11 states, and 13 more states are considering them. Alabama legislators have been trying to do damage control and protect some access to IVF, but this has just made anti-choice activists mad. The Heritage Foundation is pushing for laws that would limit the amount of embryos created during IVF cycles or even require that every embryo be implanted. Were these sorts of laws to pass, the process of pursuing a wanted pregnancy through fertility treatments would instead become another way for conservative legislators to control the body of the pregnant person.
For some right-wingers, controlling every aspect of pregnancy still isn’t enough. Hence why a state like Missouri, where abortion is already banned, also blocks people from getting a divorce if they are pregnant. Even if the woman is a victim of abuse by her husband — even if another child in the household is a victim of abuse from their father — divorce is not an option until after she gives birth. The same is true of Texas and Arkansas. It’s no coincidence that both of those states also fully ban abortion.
Some high-profile Republicans, including professional trolls like Steven Crowder and Matt Walsh, are also pushing to get rid of no-fault divorce. Before Trump tapped him to be a federal judge in Texas, Matthew Kacsmaryk — who has been busy blocking teenagers from obtaining birth control without parental consent and relying on debunked studies to ban mifepristone — complained that no-fault divorce removed permanence, a “pillar” of marriage law. GOP Speaker of the House Mike Johnson thinks that no-fault divorce laws contribute to society being “completely amoral” and help cause school shootings. No, really.
No-fault divorce is such a common feature of American law that it’s difficult to remember it didn’t exist anywhere in America until 1969 when Ronald Reagan signed it into law as governor of California. It took until 2010 for it to be on the books in all 50 states. It allows someone to leave their marriage without having to conjure up a legal fiction. People can just get divorced because they want to get divorced. Before no-fault divorce, intimate partner violence against women and female suicides were significantly higher, but no-fault divorce gave women a pathway to leave their abuser.
Compared to Conn Carroll, however, Crowder, Walsh, Kacsmaryk, and Johnson sound positively reasonable. Where Johnson believes that no-fault divorce somehow leads to school shootings, Carroll believes that the entire social safety net from 1964 onward penalizes married couples and that the way to preserve marriage is to take away every economic support a single person or single parent might need. He thinks that programs like SNAP, Section 8, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the expansion of Medicaid “punishes working-class parents who want to get married.”
Unsurprisingly, Carroll doesn’t explain how, for example, Head Start, which provides early learning and school readiness programs for children in low-income families, punishes people who wish to get married. Similarly, Carroll doesn’t deign to explain how the Earned Income Tax Credit, available to single and married people alike, discriminates against those who want to marry. His argument is likely that getting married increases a couple’s earnings enough that they would not qualify for various programs.
This argument makes no sense with programs like Head Start. Eligibility for Head Start is based on federal poverty guidelines, which increase depending on the number of people in a household. Things are murkier for federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which provides cash assistance, but each state can set its own rules regarding cohabitation versus marriage. However, while marriage may affect eligibility in some states, there is no evidence that people make decisions regarding marriage based on TANF eligibility. But the conservatives at the Heritage Foundation, for example, love complaining that welfare programs discourage people from getting married.
Were this to be true, there is an easy solution: expand the social safety net so that more people, including married couples, qualify for benefits. But that’s not what conservatives actually want. There’s no widespread conservative push to provide lower-income families with more resources. It’s as much of a myth as the right-wing assertion that once abortion was outlawed, conservative states would provide terrific care for people during pregnancy.
Conservatives have shoveled millions at so-called “pregnancy resource centers,” which aren’t actual medical clinics but have instead existed primarily to trick people out of getting abortions. Shortly before the demise of Roe, an Associated Press study found that those states with the strictest abortion laws were the same states that didn’t adequately provide funding for pregnant people or young children.
Restricting freedom for thee but not for me
It’s no coincidence that Carroll’s list of programs that offend his sensibilities as regards marriage are the same programs that conservatives always hate: anything that provides resources for people who are living in poverty or otherwise marginalized.
The ways in which conservatives are pursuing their dream of dismantling reproductive freedom are inextricably linked to their goal of eliminating any supports that allow for economic stability. Both drastically decrease people's autonomy to make their own choices about their bodies and live in whatever familial arrangements they wish. Where the push to outlaw birth control is the right wing trying to take us back to the 1960s, before birth control was legal, the push to eradicate financial safety nets is an attempt to drag the country back to a time when there was no Social Security, no New Deal, and no resources for people living in poverty.
It’s a profoundly destabilizing and depressing worldview, one with no future save for increasing the ability of conservatives to kick everyone else in the teeth.
That’s it for today
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We’ll be back with more tomorrow. Until then, have a good one.
The "belief that life begins at conception" is patently false. Life begins long before that. In fact, the egg that eventually developed into you was alive and well in your mother's ovary months before she was born! Of course, conception was a crucial point in your long journey toward personhood. But I challenge anyone who claims to believe that a fertilized human egg is the moral equivalent of a baby to consider this: You are a mother of a newborn baby, and you are in the maternity ward. Your baby is in the newborn nursery down the corridor to the left. Down the corridor to the right is the IVF clinic where you have two frozen embryos. A fire breaks out and you have time to save your newborn baby or your two frozen embryos. Which will you choose? Now ask yourself this: How many frozen embryos would you have to save to justify abandoning your newborn baby, as the “moral” choice?
Many "believers" have been, and continue to be, bamboozled by their religious leaders about this moral question. But the simple act of considering the above ethical "dilemma" reveals the truth: When asked to act on their supposed "belief", no sane person actually believes that a fertilized human egg is the moral equivalent of a baby.
Sincerely,
Justin StormoGipson, MD
Since Dobbs, D’s and women of all stripes have stood up. Vote in November!
The choice is starkly clear: Biden or Dictatorship