Don't go there
The problem with letting people have rights is that they get used to having them and react badly when you take those rights away.
I’m talking, of course, about the June 24 Supreme Court decision that takes away women’s constitutional right to control their own reproductive functions – and also declares that you have no constitutional right to privacy.
The decision by the right-wing court supermajority to overturn Roe v. Wade takes women way farther back than the bloody coat hanger days. Instead, it takes us back to 1873 when Puritanical anti-vice activist Anthony Comstock got Congress to pass the stunningly repressive Comstock laws that made not just agents of abortion but also contraception illegal. It banned “obscene” literature and “articles of immoral use,” as well as sex toys or mailing any information about banned items, even in personal letters. So much for First Amendment freedom of speech.
About half the states passed related laws.
The Supreme Court overturned restrictions on contraceptives in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, but that was only for married couples. The 1972 Eisenstadt v. Baird decision opened it to unmarried people. Then the Roe v. Wade decision proclaimed women’s right to abortion based on a right to privacy “implied” in the Constitution.
Before Comstock, abortions apparently were provided fairly routinely by midwives. In the early 1800s, methods were published on how to end an early pregnancy.
After the draft Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade leaked in May, NPR reported that Benjamin Franklin produced an Americanized version of a British pamphlet of useful household information. Franklin’s version included information such as a 1734 medical handbook in Virginia that had all the best known herbal abortion and contraception agents of the time.
Apparently this info was no big deal back then, but the leaked draft opinion claimed, “a right to abortion isn’t deeply rooted in the nation’s history and traditions.”
Now that’s swept away, along with that implied right to privacy. But hate speech and ever more guns on the streets are fine.
As if all this wasn’t bad enough, the right-wing justices have agreed to consider an extreme proposal in their fall term that could be the nail in the coffin for democracy. It’s a claim from North Carolina that state legislatures (controlled by the GOP, of course) can do extreme partisan gerrymandering and even overturn election results, with no check and balance from state courts or state constitutions.
Why allow something this extreme on the table unless the agenda is to take our country there? Are they seeking to predetermine the result of the 2024 presidential election?
The majority in America who want to keep democracy and have government officials protect rights instead of canceling them will have to suck it up and do whatever it takes to resist where SCOTUS and the GOP are taking us. Government is supposed to be based on the consent of the governed. We DO NOT consent!
– Carole McWilliams, Bayfield