Banning Abortion Is Just The Beginning For The Right

Trump and McConnell's plan to ram a far right Supreme Court Justice through weeks before the election will have unfathomably grave consequences for America.

by Justin Rosario

With a 6-3 majority and 4 more years of Trump, America will look at the banning of abortion not as the culmination of a long-held right-wing fantasy but the beginning of the descent into a true police state.

Far too many people, including older people who do not have the excuse of being born decades after Roe v. Wade was decided, do not seem to understand how deeply the right-wing hates the concept of individual freedom. They think their opposition to abortion is just about hurting women or as a useful culture war tool.

It is so much worse than that.

Attacking Reproductive Rights Is Easy

The reason there is so much focus on abortion is because women are an easy target in America. It’s a given that we are a deeply racist country. We wallow in it like a pig in filth and refuse to confront our racist past lest we upset the millions of hardcore bigots who both venerate that racism and pretend it doesn’t exist in the same breath. But aside from the racism deep in our national DNA, we are also a seriously misogynistic country. (cont below)

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We may no longer treat women like property the way they do in fundamentalist Islamic countries, but we’re not so many decades away from when we did. We did not allow women to own a credit card until the 1970s unless her husband signed off on it. We’re just 100 years out from women gaining the right to vote. Starting in 1907, we sterilized tens of thousands of women (but far less men) against their will; a practice we’ve started again in Trump’s concentration camps. 

Today, dress codes in schools almost exclusively apply to girls. Women are regularly misdiagnosed by doctors because they are not taken seriously when they complain of symptoms. The overwhelming majority of rapists go unpunished, even after #MeToo.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that there are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of laws regulating women’s bodies. And where there are no laws, there’s this:

People who want their tubes tied (formally known as tubal ligation) can be denied the procedure for a multitude of reasons at various stages of their lives: because they’re too young, childless, only have one child, are not married, are married to someone with a risky job—the list goes on.

Try getting a law passed in, say, Kansas to stop doctors from telling women they can’t get their tubes tied and they’ll laugh you out of the legislative chamber. Mind you, no babies are being harmed but the very idea of allowing women the freedom to make their own decisions is borderline insane to conservatives.

But people are fooling themselves if they think the right will stop once they’ve turned women into broodmares. The real prize is the right to privacy.

Griswold v. Connecticut

If you don’t know Griswold, you had best familiarize yourself with it and fast. While Roe is the decision that allows women to have an abortion, Griswold is the decision from eight years prior that allows women, including married women, to have any kind of reproductive rights at all.

Before Griswold, it was 100% legal and constitutional to ban contraceptives. Not just birth control pills but every kind of contraceptive. Without this one decision, there would be legal IUDs, no spermicidal jellies, no diaphragms, no condoms, no pills, nothing. 

About ten seconds after the Republican extremists on the Supreme Court do away with Roe, Republicans in deep red states will be going after Griswold. 

This is not conjecture. Rick Santorum was openly discussing this during his 2012 presidential run and no one on the right blinked an eye. They didn’t see anything wrong with calling for the overturning of Griswold which would lead to the banning of all contraceptives.

More recently, the National Review made the same case:

Recent developments in the Supreme Court and a host of challenges from new state laws have led many to wonder whether Roe’s days are numbered. They probably are; let’s hope so. The outcry at Justice Thomas’s opinion brings up the question of whether Griswold will go with it. As a strictly legal matter, it seems nearly inevitable: The shoddy constitutional justification for Roe is basically the entirety of the Griswold ruling. To say that the foundations of Roe are unjustified is to say that Griswold itself is unjustified.

Review tries to pretend that birth control would never ever be outlawed but, of course, that is exactly what would end up happening sooner or later. Because once you get rid of Griswold, you get rid of the right to privacy that Griswold created and then Republicans can do whatever they want.

The Right To Privacy Is Not In The Constitution

Did you think you had a constitutional right to privacy? You do! But only as long as the Supreme Court says so. It is not to be found in the Constitution.

When the Court decided Griswold, the way they justified telling the state of Connecticut they could not regulate what people do in the privacy of their bedroom was by inferring a “right to privacy” from the other rights enumerated in the Constitution.

In other words, if you have the right to free speech and religion, the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, the right not to allow the government to house soldiers in your home, etc., then you must have the right to privacy in your home. That means the government can’t regulate your intimate relations.

Later, that right naturally led to the right for a woman to control her reproductive cycle, the end of outlawing homosexuality, and, of course, marriage equality. But with one ruling, the right wing can undo all of that. And more. 

Let’s not mince words here: White Republican voters have fully embraced fascism. They do not actually believe in freedom anymore than they believe in democracy. They may balk at the idea of losing the right to privacy for a minute until they’re told all of the ways it can be used to hurt the people they hate. Then they will happily cheer the police state with a fervor that would make George Orwell rise from the grave and kill himself in protest.

Big Brother On Steroids

Without the constitutional right to privacy, there would be nothing stopping President Tom Cotton’s FBI from tracking all of your internet activity. Your cell phone data? An open book to the police whenever they feel like checking it. Who needs warrants? You have no right to privacy.

Hey, we noticed you met with John Smith. Mr. Smith has been posting anti-Cotton memes on Facebook. We just need to bring you in for some questions. We just need to see if you might be part of a terrorist cell. No, you don’t get a lawyer, you terrorist scum.

Or perhaps you were campaigning for an opposition candidate. Well, look at that. They found child pornography on your computer. What’s that? It’s a picture of your baby in the bathtub? Meh, they’ll figure it out after the election, assuming you survive prison. Too bad you had that on your computer where anyone from the government could look at it. And it’s all legal because you don’t have a right to privacy.

The right talks a big game about “freedom” and “liberty” but what they always mean is the freedom to make other people live the way they feel is “proper.” Take away the right of privacy and they will, as quickly as possible, start passing laws regulating people’s personal behavior in and out of the bedroom.

As you read this, they are outlawing protests and trying to make it legal to run protesters down. Read that again and understand: In the state of Florida, Republicans are trying to make it legal for a white Republican voter to plow his car into protesters and claim he was afraid for his life. There have been over 60 of these kinds of terrorist attacks already, all of them perpetrated by the right, and now Republicans want to give them the legal blessing of the state.

If they’re willing to do that, what do you think Republicans will do with the kind of unlimited power provided by a government unconstrained by the right of privacy?

The only way to stop this, because Republicans will absolutely replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a far right extremist, will be for Democrats to retake the White House and the Senate and then pack the Supreme Court with four more Justices. If not, Biden’s administration will spend 4 years having everything blocked by the Court before Tom Cotton “wins” the 2024 election and finishes the job Trump started.

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