Boston Globe | Alito’s hall-of-mirrors opinion on Roe reveals the GOP’s death spiral

Column originally appeared in the Boston Globe
By Yvonne Abraham

It has been a few days since Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s hall-of-mirrors opinion seeking to overturn Roe v Wade was leaked. But for those of us who support abortion rights, it will be a long time before the shock subsides, if it ever does.

We all knew something like this was coming: Republicans’ machinations over the last few years left no doubt that one day soon we’d arrive at the moment when the nation’s highest court would overturn the 50-year-old precedent.

“I never wanted to be wrong about something so much in my life,” said Rebecca Hart Holder, head of Reproductive Equity Now.

But Alito’s decision – just a draft, the chief justice reminds us, but let’s get real here – is so expansive that his reasoning (if one can call it that) imperils other rights as well. As others have pointed out, Alito’s very restrictive interpretation of the 14th Amendment means other hard-won rights, including same-sex marriage, are now threatened.

Hart Holder points out that the court didn’t have to go this far: It could simply uphold the Mississippi abortion restrictions at the heart of the case, effectively gutting Roe rather than going directly at it – and, by implication, at other constitutional rights built on the same scaffolding.

Of all the spurious and outrageous assertions Alito makes in a ruling that would strip away the rights and safety of millions of citizens, one is especially galling.

Washing his hands of the consequences of the decision, Alito claims that abortion is now a matter for the voters – women voters, he says, as if they’re the only ones affected by pregnancies, planned and otherwise – to resolve. Turning the issue of abortion back to the states, half of which would outlaw it almost immediately, “allows women on both sides of the abortion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting and running for office. Women are not without electoral or political power.”

Oh of course, elections will help settle the question of whether women who can’t afford to travel will now be forced to give birth, even if their pregnancies result from rape.

Why didn’t we think of that? Oh yeah, we did!

It takes a lot of nerve for Alito to call democracy the solution here, given how his GOP – his very bench – has been making a mockery of it for years. He and his colleagues have opened the door for virtually unlimited monetary influence in elections and destroyed the Voting Rights Act. One of his colleagues sits in a seat Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell stole from a Democratic president, refusing to consider Barack Obama’s nominee during an election year. McConnell then installed an anti-abortion zealot after voting began in the next election.

And how did we get here in the first place? How did Republicans get to stack benches across the land with so many conservative jurists pining for the good ol’ days of 1787? How did they gain legislative majorities in the states, and in Washington, that allowed them to enact abortion restrictions and voting restrictions – the former made possible by the latter – even though most voters support abortion rights?

It’s no coincidence that we’ve arrived at this country’s lowest moment in decades when it comes to both voting rights and abortion rights. The two have been intertwined, in a death-spiral, since the 1970s, when Republicans suddenly got religion on abortion as a way to win the support of white Catholics and other voters for whom their antiworker policies and their racist siren songs were losing their luster, or at least their veneer of propriety.

Now it looks like all of the one-issue voters who so desperately wanted to shut down women’s autonomy will succeed, at least in half of the states.

So how does the GOP maintain their devotion now that the dog has caught the car?

Supply more cars, of course: introducing a fetal personhood law that would make abortion illegal even in blue states like ours; restricting contraception; rolling back rights for trans people; undoing the constitutional protection for same-sex marriage.

Those chases have already begun. If Alito’s decision stands, the dogs will enjoy a massive advantage.