By Rebecca Solnit, Photo: Allison Bailey/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock, The Guardian, December 10, 2021
A lot of people with a lot of power don’t see why women should have jurisdiction over their own bodies. That’s the anti-abortion argument in a nutshell, in that they claim a foetus, or even an embryo, or in some cases even a fertilised egg too small for the human eye to see, has rights that supersede those of the person inside whose body that egg, embryo or foetus might be.
What was clear from the rightwing pundits and conservative supreme court justices who have piped up over the last month as arguments were being heard in the most significant abortion rights case since Roe v Wade, is that in a country whose constitution is supposed to grant us all a lot of rights, they are happy to strip away a right so fundamental it’s unimaginable in other circumstances – or that it would be stripped from other people, namely men. In the case, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the state of Mississippi is asking the court to rule on whether it can outlaw abortions after 15 weeks’ gestation. They are asking, in other words, for the right to punish women for being women.
On Friday morning, the supreme court issued a mixed ruling on another state law restricting abortion access: Texas’s law, designed to evade federal oversight. Eight of the justices upheld a lower court finding that abortion providers should have the right to sue; Justice Thomas did not join them. The four more liberal judges voted for broader rights to sue; the four other conservatives ruled that they can only sue the licensing officials. Judge Sotomayor, in a passionate dissent, wrote: “This is a brazen challenge to our federal structure. It echoes the philosophy of John C Calhoun, a virulent defender of the slaveholding South who insisted that States had the right to “veto” or “nullif[y]” any federal law with which they disagreed.” She added: “The Nation fought a Civil War over that proposition.” Before the civil war, the US was split between free and slave states; the contemporary nation is increasingly divided between reproductive-rights-access states and anti-abortion states.
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