They finally overturned Roe
2022 marks the year that they finally got the Supremes to overturn Roe vs. Wade. I’ve been following this issue from the very first days of writing this blog. It’s been a depressing trajectory. On the 10th anniversary of this blog, I wrote the following:
My advocacy for a woman’s right to abortion predates this blog by decades. It’s a fundamental struggle for half the population and I’ve very much appreciated the attention and support of my readers over these last 10 years of writing about it.
In this last election rape unexpectedly became a campaign issue. Oddly enough the concept of “legitimate rape” was something I’d written about some years ago when South Dakota tried to pass a ban on abortion without an exception for rape or incest (pending reversal of Roe vs Wade, of course.) This was, at the time, an unusual position. It’s much more mainstream in the pro-life community today.
The Sodomized Virgin Exception
by digby
BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.
BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.
Do you suppose all these elements have to be present for it to be sufficiently psychologically damaging for her to be forced to bear her rapists child, or just some of them? I wonder if it would be ok if the woman wasn’t religious but she was a virgin who had been brutally, savagely raped and “sodomized as bad as you can make it?” Or if she were a virgin and religious but the brutal savage sodomy wasn’t “as bad” as it could have been?
Certainly, we know that if she wasn’t a virgin, she was asking for it, so she should be punished with forced childbirth. No lazy “convenient” abortion for her, the little whore. It goes without saying that the victim who was saving it for her marriage is a good girl who didn’t ask to be brutally raped and sodomized like the sluts who didn’t hold out. But even that wouldn’t be quite enough by itself. The woman must be sufficiently destroyed psychologically by the savage brutality that the forced childbirth would drive her to suicide (the presumed scenario in which this pregnancy could conceivably “threaten her life.”)
Someone should ask this man about this. He seems to have given it a good deal of thought. I suspect many hours have been spent luridly contemplating the brutal, savage rape and sodomy (as bad as it can be) of a religious virgin and how terrible it would be for her. It seems quite vivid in his mind.
I went on to note that there had once more been been quite a discussion during the 2012 election about how much the Democrats should be willing to “compromise” on abortion in order to take the issue “off the table” once and for all. I featured an interview with Lawrence Tribe who had written a book with Barack Obama about abortion in which the two liberal men worked out that we just needed to provide more services to pregnant women, offer better contraception and adoption services and be more compassionate toward those who believe that abortion is wrong. Tribe said they found that they “could find ways of making abortion less necessary, making less people feel desperate enough to feel that they had to end a pregnancy, making contraception more available, making education more widely available, making adoption a more realistic option.”
I wrote:
Notice the assumptions in all that — that abortions are only “necessary” if women feel desperate or are uneducated or simply can’t find a good way to put their children up for adoption. As if the millions and millions of American women who have abortions year after year just need some “services” that will make it so they will be happy to go through pregnancy and childbirth regardless of the circumstances in their own lives at the time or the emotional difficulty of then giving up their own offspring for someone else to raise. (Do these people think that’s easy to do if only you have the right phone numbers?)
This issue will never be “solved” at least not that way. There will always be unintended pregnancies. That is a function of being human. And there will always be abortion. There always has been. Some people do not agree that women should have the right to do that and they will agitate to outlaw it. But it will not prevent it. Because women do own their own bodies and direct their own lives and some of them will go to extreme lengths to maintain that autonomy, even if it means putting their health and lives in danger. We have centuries of data supporting this.
So when a couple of elite males decide that they will find some sweet spot that will make these women happy as well as those who don’t think these women should have the right to make that choice, it’s an infuriating denial of women’s basic human agency.
It is simple. Women are going to have abortions, full stop. The only question is whether or not they are going to be forced to go through hell and possibly die to get them — and whether society is going to admit that it cannot and should not make that decision for them. Once you accept that reality, the rest is just talk. If religious leaders want to counsel their adherents not to do it, fine. If politicians want to lecture the public that it’s wrong, fine. If they want to create programs to help women get access to birth control and afford to raise kids if they want them and all the rest, terrific. If you care about your fellow humans, you should want all of that. But the right to abortion is a fundamental human right and the necessity of it being safe, legal and available is a requirement for a decent society.
The common behavior of everyday women from all walks of life proves that this is a simple question:
I added, “this one doesn’t seem to be going away. One can hope that they’ve reached peaked wingnut in 2012. But then I’ve thought that before.”
Uhm … they didn’t reach peak wingnut in 2012. And it took the Supreme Court finally making it clear that the anti-abortion movement was not interested in “compromise” before the Democrats finally figured out that this was not an issue that could be negotiated. By that time pregnant 10 year old rape victims had to be smuggled into other states in order to be spared forced childbirth.
The anti-abortion zealots had finally decided there were absolutely no exceptions at all.
If you’ve been reading this blog during these past 20 years, you know how strongly I feel about this issue. Unfortunately, while the high court decision may have galvanized Democrats into finally taking the side of the American people in this debate we now have to fight on the state level all over the country. And the suffering is going to be immense for many years to come.
This is the Republican Party’s fault, of course. Mitch McConnell can take a special bow for packing the Supreme Court. (Failing to get the Senate in 2022 is hardly enough punishment for what he did.) But Democrats spent years and years trying to cajole these people by giving away bits and piece of women’s bodily autonomy even as some of us were screaming that if you give them an inch they will take a mile.
Well, they took a mile. And they will take another one and another one and another one unless the Democrats hold the line and fight back on all fronts. Let’s hope they have finally learned that lesson.
If any of this is important to you, I hope you’ll consider supporting this old blog for another year if you haven’t already done so. I don’t delude myself that I have any great influence on anyone important but there are some who follow our work here and you never know. But regardless, I still believe it’s important to push where we can and synthesize what’s happening for people with busy lives.
If you’d like to help you can do so here.. And thank you so much for making the hollandaise so happy this year. I really appreciate it. 🙂