Why The Fall of Roe Gives America An Opportunity To Right An Historic Wrong
Conservatives are celebrating the fall of Roe, liberals mourning. Here's why the end of Roe gives us the opportunity to create a better system for all.
Although I tend to lean fairly left, I am neither a Democrat nor Republican; largely because of the hypocrisy that both sides display at various times. This is one of those times. The truth is that Roe has been overturned because one woman literally made it her life’s mission to get it done. If the victory belongs to anyone, it is her, not any of the Conservative Christians breaking their arms patting themselves on the back and holding celebrations across the country. Obviously, this is not the first time men have bent over backwards giving themselves credit for the achievements of a woman.
The problem is that not only is Marjorie Dannenfelser opposed to abortion in cases of incest and rape, but also to most forms of birth control. Republicans backed, supported and got into bed with the absolute hardest of hardliners when it comes to reproductive rights and I don’t think they fully appreciate what that means. Dannenfelser is not driven by a love for babies, she chose abortion as a cause because she figured out long ago that you can get away with just about anything if your cause seems noble enough. She doesn’t gives one rat’s ass about women or babies; she loves power.
In the last few years, Dannenfelser has spent in excess of $85 million a year to secure pockets full of politicians, not to mention making massive investments in making sure plenty of inflammatory language like “baby murder” is used heavily and frequently by the Right. If she really cared about women and children, she could have been raising that same money to create programs to support them or even lobbying congress to re-designate the $4 Billion they’ve spent on football stadiums towards programs for them.
For that matter, if churches really cared about women and children, they could use the $124 Billion they collect in tithes & offerings each year on what those monies are intended for: programs for the poor & needy. But they don’t, because this isn’t about women and children or even saving babies, it’s about power. Churches actually spend 75% of people’s tithes & offerings on their own salaries and buildings and only designate 10% to programs, or the things those tithes and offerings are intended for.
They are more than happy to take credit for Dannenfelser’s Roe victory, because it doesn’t cost them anything. They are perfectly in favor of making abortion illegal but not of spending money on programs that would make it simply unnecessary. After all, pastors don’t want to have to give up their $600,000 a year salaries, multi-million dollar homes, private jets, $80,000 luxury cars, $1,000 sweaters, or $800 sneakers.
The irony is that most male politicians aren’t actually opposed to abortion. If anything, they support it because, let’s face it, none of them want their mistresses or rape victims having their offspring. What liberals don’t want to admit, however, is the role they played in finally giving Dannenfelser what she has been blindly and zealously pursuing for more than 40 years now.
For decades now, women have chanted the slogan “my body, my choice” in reference to reproductive rights. In 2021, however, with the rollout of the vaccine and the new vaccine mandates liberals were highly in favor of, Republicans rightly questioned what happened to “my body, my choice?”
One of the problems of Roe v. Wade is that it based the right to abortion on the language of privacy found in the Constitution. It never had anything to do with bodily autonomy. In fact, many critics have rightfully pointed out that the right to an abortion is not specifically guaranteed or even mentioned in the Constitution. In many ways, the only reason Roe has not been overturned before this was simply that public sentiment against it was never high enough.
What many people misunderstand about the American justice system is that at least to some degree laws always follows the will of the people. Even though Supreme Court Justices aren’t voted into or out of office, their ultimate job is still to serve the American people. That’s how a representational Democracy works. We are also, however, a Constitutional Democracy, which means the Supreme Court also has to thread the needle between the current will of the people and the perceived intentions of the framers of the Constitution.
Theoretically, they are supposed to interpret law based on the “spirit of” the Constitution. As we have seen many times over, however, they tend to interpret law based largely on how the party that installed them wishes them to interpret it. Although the Supreme Court is supposed to be non-partisan, it is abundantly clear it is anything but.
The turning point for Roe was literally the vaccine mandates that raised the ire of enough Americans that it created exactly the kind of public sentiment needed to get it overturned. At least, that is, with a little extra help from Marjorie Dannenfelser and crew. She and her anti-abortion coalition haven’t just spent the last 40 years manipulating government officials but also the American people.
She made sure that anti-abortion materials were spread plentifully, peppered with inflammatory language like “baby murder” and featured plenty of plump, angelic white babies. Materials that were masterfully crafted to create a direct unconscious link between abortion and a perceived systematic genocide of white babies. Dannenfelser spent years setting the stage, planting the right seeds, filling her pockets with politicians and waiting for just the right moment to strike. Liberals handed her that moment on a silver platter.
If you had taken a poll in 2019, probably 80% of Americans would have been against overturning Roe, including the majority of Catholics and Evangelicals. While it theoretically went against their own religious beliefs, they had no real compelling reason to try and take away the freedoms of those that don’t believe the same way they do. Until the vaccine mandates.
Hate is a powerful emotion that creates intensely strong connections.
Research has shown that like-minded individuals are powerfully drawn to one another, but hate is the most powerful connector of all. Not only is hate an intensely powerful emotion in and of itself, but also creates intensely strong bonds with others who share a similar hatred. Anger is also a powerful emotion, which can be valuable, but can also be easily fanned into rage.
There is perhaps no more fertile soil for the seeds of hate to be planted in than a field of rage. Numerous leaders throughout history have discovered ways to turn anger into rage and rage into hatred, which they then used to carry out their own agendas. Hitler did it in Germany, Stalin in Russia and Trump in America. So did Marjorie Dannenfelser.
She and her minions stoked the Right’s anger over Covid restrictions and vaccine mandates into a fiery rage, which she then focused on the baby-killing liberals, which finally brought her the victory she has sought for more than 40 years. If you need evidence that this is true just look at the response of the religious right. There is nothing measured or reasonable about it; no kindness or compassion towards the women it affects. They are savages celebrating a kill.
But hate is also a poisonous emotion that can feed on the very soul of the one who feels it. It completely cuts you off from emotions like tenderness, kindness, compassion or empathy. Even further, it cuts off all rational, reasonable thought, which is what people like Dannenfelser and Trump count on. Hate bonding can lead entire groups of people to commit heinous actions in the midst of their hate-fueled rage, that they might never otherwise imagine themselves even capable of.
The actions you take while in the throes of a murderous hatred then creates an even bigger problem. You either have to wake up and face the consequences of the actions you’ve now committed - and what those actions say about you - or double down into self-righteousness. I think we’ve seen a lot of that doubling down in the last few days, if not the last few years.
It is ironic that Republicans are those most opposed to communism, yet can’t seem to see that what they are supporting is, in fact, communism - which is realistically a form of slavery. Although communists claim that they only believe in the collective ownership of property and control of economies, the truth is, any lack of bodily autonomy is actually slavery.
A slave is someone who has no ownership of or right to make decisions about their own body. Technically the 13th amendment abolished slavery, but slavery is not just about ownership but also about control. The 13th amendment abolished the ability to own another human, but it never abolished the ability of one person or group of people to control another. That is still slavery. Which means, we never fully abolished all forms of slavery in the U.S.
While this definition doesn’t frame it in these terms, it think it would be fair to say that slavery is also the involuntary loss of control over one’s body or person to another.
Theoretically, the framers of the Constitution were highly in favor of personal freedom and autonomy. The Declaration of Independence states:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”
When it came to drafting the Constitution, however, the framers were in a bit of a pickle. They had to very carefully craft a document that afforded full rights and freedoms to some men, while still being vague enough to not afford them to others. What we need to recognize is that this created the framework by which we are still subject to slavery because the framers could not use the kind of bold, specific language in the Constitution that would create the same “freedom for all” that they did in the Declaration of Independence.
Rather than doing the hard work of abolishing slavery by changing the hearts and minds of slave owners in the South, we instead chose to go to war over it. While the North declared themselves the victors, the South is in many ways still fighting the Civil War, with Blacks still paying the price.
If you ask today’s liberals, they will most likely tell you the war was fought over slavery. If you ask conservatives, however, they are more likely to say it was about whether Northern states had the right to tell Southern states what to do. More importantly, whether they had the right to inflict their values on Southern States. Slavery was simply the issue that brought the conflict to a head, but Black people remain a constant symbol of that conflict, which is why there remains such hatred to this day.
Liberals (who, ironically, were Republicans at the time) still pat themselves on the back for ridding America of slavery, but they didn’t actually win the victory they want to claim. Both liberals and conservatives still hate the thought of having to bow to the other’s values which is exactly how we ended up where we are today. And the truth is, they are both right. No one in America should be held to the values of anyone else. The only values we should be held to are those that we agree as an entire nation are important.
The Civil War was not won nearly as decisively as today’s liberals want to believe. New laws had to be very carefully crafted to dole out only the smallest number of rights to Blacks as possible in order to keep the peace and keep from going to war again. In other words, to this very day, we still have not fully and completely abolished slavery. We have not clearly codified into law the right of every American to fully own and control their own bodies as well as making them fully and completely equal to each other.
WHY IT STILL MATTERS
In 1980, China instituted a one-child policy that resulted in the genocide of millions of baby girls thanks to a centuries-old preference for boys. It also resulted in millions of involuntary abortions and sterilizations. If a woman gave birth to a girl, she simply killed it so she could try again for a boy.
Living infants were either killed outright or left to die in public markets in hopes that someone would take them. Of course, no one did because they all wanted boys. Eventually, however, recognizing a potential for profit, criminal organizations sprang into action selling girls on the open market. While some went to legitimate adoptive parents, just as many were sold to sex traffickers.
If you are one of many that believe overturning Roe somehow protects babies, I highly recommend you watch the documentary One Child Nation. This is why there are so many women who are anti-abortion but pro-choice. They believe abortion is wrong, but they also understand that putting reproductive decisions in the hands of the government is even worse. In fact, it’s called Communism.
În 1966, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu banned both abortion and contraceptives out of a belief that population growth would lead to economic growth. He also lowered the legal marriage age to 15, instituted a ‘childlessness tax’ and provided financial incentives for mothers. This led to the institutionalization of more than 100,000 children that parents could not care for, and unfortunately, neither could the government.
Ceaușescu’s policies led to the highest maternal mortality rates in Europe, the highest number of deaths from abortion, between 15,000 and 20,000 unnecessary deaths of children and an entire generation of emotionally afflicted, malnourished “orphans” raised in miserable conditions.
What both of these cautionary tales have in common is that this is what happens when governments are given control over reproduction. Today, China is facing an impending demographic and economic crisis and more than 30 years after the fall of Ceaușescu’s regime, nearly one-third of Romanian children are still housed in residential homes maintained by the state.
Too many women live under the delusion that overturning Roe is just about abortion. It’s not. It’s about who controls a woman’s reproductive system - a woman or the government. Even more importantly, however, it is about who has the right to make decisions about your body.
Men should also think very carefully about supporting laws that control woman’s reproductive systems, because those laws can just as easily turn against them. It should not go unnoticed by men that more and more women are running for elected office and winning. If there ever comes a time when female politicians outnumber males, then men may find themselves the targets of enforced sterilization the same way women have been for years.
PUTTING IT TO REST
There is a way of putting all of these issues to rest once and for all. Right now, America has a patchwork of laws that give and take away a number of different personal rights and freedoms which are largely dependent on who is in power. We can settle a number of them for good by simply creating, or reinforcing, one simple law.
Every adult owns their own body and has the sole right to make decisions about it.
No one has the right to tell anyone else what they can and can’t do with it, nor should they be subject to government regulation or interference. Like all just laws, it means both sides give up something but both sides also gain something that is important to them.
No more government medical mandates for adults (including vaccines)
No more government interference in adult reproductive rights
No more criminalization of drug addiction or sex work
No more government interference in adult sexuality
Realistically, the government should not be in the bedrooms of any grown-ass adults and it should not have the power to make medical decisions for anyone. When you look at what the government would be prohibited from regulating, it almost all falls under the category of morality. What’s sad, however, is how few people are willing to give up their right to control others in order to not be controlled by others. The truth is, the only way to be truly free is to set others free. By reserving your right to control others when your party is in power, you also give others the right to control you when it’s their turn to be in power.
Roe established extremely limited rights for a very narrow purpose. While it is true that the Constitution does not specifically mention abortion, it should not have to because abortion should not be its own separate issue in the first place. Laws should a apply to a complete and total human being that are equal for all adults. What is unconstitutional is for women’s uteruses to ever be singled out for special legislation in the first place.
The issue is, who has the right to make decisions about an individual’s body? The individual (and only the individual) or whoever is in power in government at the time? As long as we choose the second option, we will all be vulnerable.
We call July 4th Independence Day. Perhaps it is time to make all Americans truly free and fully equal to each other, once and for all.
SCOTUS isn't going to allow any progressive laws to stand and when Republicans get a narrow majority and toss the filibuster to ban abortion nationwide this SCOTUS will uphold it. People on the left who didn't vote by their own choice especially those who just couldn't vote for Hillary should be OK with everything that is resulting, they got what they want.