Banning abortion was the first step, not the last

https://www.publicnotice.co/p/scotus-banning-abortion-was-the-first-step


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.”

*snip*