Women, wake the fuck up

The Republican Party is coming for your rights — all of them.

Whoosh — don’t look now, but that’s the sound of your rights flushing down the drain of history. Which ones? Well, pretty much all of them, but let’s talk about those that relate to your body/health, autonomy, agency and independence.

Start with the sabotage of Roe V. Wade. A devastating blow, one that is already sending ripples beyond simple access to abortion. It would be bad enough if it just took a medical decision out of a woman’s hands and placed it into the state’s. But as a principle, the right of a woman to choose termination of a pregnancy had been established as a constitutional right for 50 years — and never in its history has the Supreme Court ended a basic constitutional protection.

And the first one the Court takes away is from women, at a vulnerable time in their lives. No matter how YOU personally feel about abortion — whether you think it should be legal, whether there should be some restrictions or none, whether there should be exceptions for rape, incest, life or health of the woman — what YOU think doesn’t matter, because the stern, black-robed males (and one Handmaid] of the US Supreme Court have taken away your right to decide, based on ‘precedent’ predating the American Revolution.

Justice ‘Puritan’ Sam Alito, in his opinion, justified overturning Roe based on the writings of Sir Matthew Hale, a 17th-century English jurist whose misogynist beliefs have caused enduring damage to women for hundreds of years.

The “marital rape exemption” [the legal notion that a married woman cannot be raped by her husband] — was created by Hale. Also a classic instruction to jurors to be skeptical of reports of rape. And then there was that time he sentenced two women to death—for the crime of witchcraft— during the Salem trials of the 1600s, in the Puritan theocracy that existed at the time. This is the precedent the current clerics of the Court now defer to, in deciding what the state will allow 21st century women to do with their own bodies?

This heavy-handed ruling was actually many years in the making. To understand how it happened— and why is is just the camel’s nose under the tent in terms of the even-deeper threats it portends — requires examining the vast web of organizations working through state legislatures and federal courts to enshrine the views of the Christian right into law and government policy.

Perhaps the entity most responsible for gutting Roe is Alliance Defending Freedom, a far-right legal organization whose stated goal is “to train a new generation of lawyers who will rise to positions of influence and leadership as legal scholars, litigators, judges-and perhaps even Supreme Court judges—who will work to ensure that justice is carried out in America’s courtrooms.”

The driving force is the idea that conservative Christians should be dominating every aspect of society. Adherents to this Dominionism often talk about a “biblical worldview” or “building the kingdom.”

Taking Control of ‘Seven Mountains’

The New Apostolic Reformation, a related group, dates back to C. Peter Wagner, who began preaching in the 1950s and died in 2016. He taught that God had begun preparing the world for a “third great awakening” that would sweep the earth before the apocalyptic events foretold in the Book of Revelation take place.

As part of this awakening, Christians would take dominion over the “seven mountains” or “seven spheres” of cultural influence: family, religion, education, business, government, media and the arts. (Some adherents of the belief, known as “seven mountains dominionism,” instead combine media and arts into a single category and add the military as the seventh “mountain.”)

Top Republican officials, including red state governors, regularly attend ‘prayer events’ hosted by organizations that openly adhere to “seven mountains” beliefs.

And you know who else is a BIG booster/member of both the ADF and New Apolistic Reformation?

Why, none other than “constitutional attorney” Mike Johnson, newly minted Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, who spent ten years with the ADF “protecting the rights” — of evangelical Christians, and elevating those “rights” above everyone else’s.

By pursuing a legal strategy that treats the Christian faith as under assault in America by the political left (which has infiltrated government), and aggressively defends religious rights for fear that “those freedoms will be taken away” by a secular government, Johnson keeps close company with a number of far-right justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. They include Justice Samuel Alito, who in 2021 delivered a lecture bemoaning the “hostility to religion or at least the traditional religious beliefs that are contrary to the new moral code that is ascendant in some sectors,” and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who told Notre Dame law graduates that their legal careers are “but a means to an end” of “building the kingdom of God.”

Antonin Scalia too, of course, was a fellow traveller.

Mike Johnson has three flags hanging outside his office: the American flag, the Louisiana state flag, and a flag representing a movement that wants to turn the United States into a religious Christian nation.

The flag is white with a green evergreen tree in the middle and the phrase “An Appeal to Heaven” at the top. The flag was originally used as a banner during the Revolutionary War, but over the past decade, it has been embraced by the NAR. And surprise! — also the Trumpist cult, especially the loudest election-deniers. The flag was everywhere at the January 6 insurrection/coup.

These are the dark forces which are working behind the scenes, collaborating with their co-conspiritors on the Court, to orchestrate the erasure of the modern era — and to thrust women, especially, back into the Dark Ages.

What they have accomplished so far has wrought wide-ranging suffering, as the cynical members of the the Court knew it would. The avalanche of punitive laws enacted— or revived— in several red states after the demise of Roe has severely limited women’s access to reproductive health care, and already resulted in devastating impacts, including forced birth of fetuses with fatal abnormalities, and maternal death.

Texas’ abortion restrictions — some of the strictest in the country — appear to be fueling a sudden spike in infant mortality as women are forced to carry nonviable pregnancies to term.

“Some 2,200 infants died in Texas in 2022 – an increase of 227 deaths, or 11.5%, over the previous year, according to preliminary infant mortality data from the Texas Department of State Health Services that CNN obtained through a public records request. Infant deaths caused by severe genetic and birth defects rose by 21.6%. That spike reversed a nearly decade-long decline. Between 2014 and 2021, infant deaths had fallen by nearly 15%.

One plaintiff’s fetus had a “laundry list” of diagnoses — a malformed brain, something wrong with the heart, a hole at the bottom of the spine, only one kidney. But this was just a few weeks after Texas banned abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, and so she could not obtain the procedure in Texas.

Multiple obstetrician-gynecologists who focus on high-risk pregnancies told CNN that Texas’ strict abortion laws likely behind the uptick in infant deaths.

“We all knew the infant mortality rate would go up, because many of these terminations were for pregnancies that won’t turn into healthy normal kids,” said Dr. Erika Werner, the chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Tufts Medical Center. “It’s exactly what we all were concerned about.”

Twenty-two women have joined an ongoing court challenge to Texas’ abortion laws, including two doctors. The plaintiffs allege they were denied abortion care in Texas for their medically complex pregnancies, including cases where the fetus was not expected to survive after birth. The suit, filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights, claims the state’s near-total ban on abortion violates their rights under the Texas Constitution.

After an emotional hearing in July, a Travis County judge granted a temporary injunction that protected doctors who, acting in their “good faith judgment,” terminate complicated pregnancies. The Texas Office of the Attorney General immediately appealed that ruling, putting it on hold until the Texas Supreme Court hears the case later this month.

“The harms to pregnant women in Texas is continuing every single day,” said Molly Duane, senior staff attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights. “As more people learn about the lawsuit, they continue to tell us the same things are happening to them.”

Texas has gone further than most states in criminalizing women’s health care, thanks in large part to an evil little legal weasel named Jonathon Mitchell, former clerk to Justice Antonin ‘Sociopath’ Scalia. Mitchell helped push through a law that enables any private citizen — even a total stranger, to hunt down women suspected of seeking an abortion — or anyone who advised or helped them in any way, and to collect a bounty.

Is that dystopian hellscape “Handmaid’s Tale” enough for you yet?

“In drafting the ordinance, which allows private citizens to sue each other to enforce the rules, Mitchell took a page from the playbook he used to help Texas lawmakers draft the now-famous near-total abortion ban, S.B. 8. That legislation — sometimes called the ‘bounty hunter law’ — pioneered the idea of allowing private citizens to file lawsuits worth tens of thousands of dollars against anyone they suspect of being involved in abortion.”

Abortion care in the U.S. is no longer simply difficult to access. It is illegal in 15 states and “very restricted” in several others. Abortion care providers and pregnant women seeking care are now subject to heavy fines, suspension, and in some cases, imprisonment. Criminalization has had a ripple effect; fear and suspicion have already resulted in a cascade of deleterious effects on family life, including shortages of obstetric care providers — many fleeing restrictive states out of fear of prosecution, or simply from the stress of being hamstrung in their ability to provide proper care for their patients.

“One by one, doctors who handle high-risk pregnancies are disappearing from Idaho — part of a wave of obstetricians fleeing restrictive abortion laws and a hostile state legislature.

Idaho’s obstetrics exodus is not happening in isolation. Across the country, in red states like Texas, Oklahoma and Tennessee, obstetricians — including highly skilled doctors who specialize in handling complex and risky pregnancies — are leaving their practices. Some newly minted doctors are avoiding states like Idaho.

The departures may result in new maternity care deserts, or areas that lack any maternity care, and they are placing strains on physicians who are left behind. The effects are particularly pronounced in rural areas, where many hospitals are shuttering obstetrics units for economic reasons. Restrictive abortion laws, experts say, are making that problem much worse.

“This isn’t an issue about abortion,” said Dr. Stella Dantas, the president-elect of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “This is an issue about access to comprehensive obstetric and gynecologic care. When you restrict access to care that is based in science, that everybody should have access to — that has a ripple effect.”

Nationally, women in states with abortion bans are nearly three times more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth or soon after giving birth, and the rates of newborn babies dying are much higher in states that currently ban or restrict abortions than in states preserving access, according to a new report.

The researchers analyzed data on deaths and other health outcomes using the most recent data available — from 2020 and earlier — and compared rates based on states’ current abortion access policies, as of November, after the Supreme Court decision this summer that overturned Roe v. Wade.

States that have restricted access to abortion services had maternal death rates in 2020 that were 62% higher than in states preserving access to abortion services. Between 2018 and 2020, the maternal death rate increased twice as fast in states that now have abortion restrictions, according to the report released by the research foundation Commonwealth Fund.

Overall, death rates from any cause among women of reproductive age – 15 to 44 – were 34% higher in abortion-restriction states than in abortion-access states, according to the report.

The report also says that in 2019, fetal or infant death rates in the first week of life occurred at a 15% higher rate, on average, in states with abortion restrictions than in states with wider abortion access.

But as tragic and oppressive as the situation is now, it is on track to get much, much worse, because the right-wing war on women’s/LGBT sexuality is only just gearing up. And make no mistake, it is in no way limited to abortion/pregnancy care, but also to contraception, “obscenity”, and of course, gender identity and private consensual behavior. Even speech.

Meet the Comstock Act.

When Texas Federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk overruled the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion medication mifepristone, not only was he attempting to wrest away control of our reproductive lives through a wild abuse of the law, but he was also attempting a resurrection of a notorious anti-abortion crusader who has been dead for 100 years, Anthony Comstock. Kacsmaryk is a Trump appointee serving on the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Comstock is the poster boy of sexual purity prudes, the nineteenth-century ‘moral’ entrepreneur behind an 1873 federal anti-obscenity law bearing his name, one that is still on the books to this day.

By bringing Comstock back to the forefront of the legal canon, Kacsmaryk wasn’t just ruling directly on abortion medication but offering notice that a 150-year-old law that many had presumed dead is the next vehicle that conservatives will employ to roll back sexual and reproductive freedom for anybody in the United States.

Comstock considered the provision of contraception, as well as abortion, as vehicles for moral decay and societal ruin, as many on the christian right still do. The Comstock Act’s existence doesn’t square with notions of “a country where, not long ago, social liberalism seemed largely triumphant, with the rapid acceptance of gay marriage, the growing visibility of trans people and over-the-counter access to emergency contraception,” as one New York Times opinion columnist summarized the conventional view of the present day, as if twentieth-century progress on civil rights and reproductive rights was a settled issue.

Recent events in the judiciary have only underscored, that our current courts are anything but vehicles for social progress. Instead, they are more governed by the same old norms (for example, that rich white men continue to have outsize, unaccountable influence) that much of society accepts as a given.

The Comstock Act never ended. Neither have the power structures that made it possible.

Today’s Repulican party is on a crusade to re-invigorate the Act, so much so that it is a basic platform of their agenda for 2025, a gameplan that will be followed most prominently by Trump, but also any elected Republican.

Any “moderate” establishment Republican pushback against MAGA totalitarianism has collapsed, and only a few reviled outliers like Liz Cheney are shouting into the whirlwind.

“The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a presidential transition plan vetted and crafted by more than 70 conservative and pro-life groups, details an abortion policy focused almost entirely on the operations of the Department of Justice in a second Trump term.”

“Project 2025 insists that there is already a de facto federal ban on abortion, whether voters like it or not: the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-vice law that conservatives argue makes it a federal felony to mail or receive items intended, designed, or adapted for abortion.”

And here is the heart of the matter, the rotten core: there are a great many men—and women too, especially religious fundamentalist fanatics — who desperately want to resurrect the notion that biology is destiny, and turn back the clock — way, way back. They want to excercise complete state control and ownership of our most private lives, to insert themselves into our most intimate thoughts. To reverse engineer 21st century America back into primitive, puritanitical theocracy. They are frighteningly well-funded and powerful — and they have the power of the pulpit behind them as well. It CAN happen here.

But we cannot let them win. We cannot let them take away our hard-earned rights and cede control of our minds and bodies. NO — we must do what women have always done, which is to FIGHT THE FUCK BACK.