What’s behind the manipulated and blatantly partisan U.S. Supreme Court bid to overturn a critical landmark decision that allowed women in this country the right to make the most important decision of their lives — whether or not to become mothers?
A hidden agenda.
One unleashed and being brought to fruition by the rise of a powerful and immoral misogynist man with a bone to pick with a particular kind of successful — and free — American woman, now under political assault by the male, anti-abortion Republican governors and legislators of Florida, Texas and other red states.
And so, here we are, at the place we thought we’d never again be, at the cusp of losing the only constitutional guarantee women have against white supremacist men who would rather live in a 1950s world of pregnant, subservient, powerless women.
The Supreme Court's conservative majority — authors of an unprecedented draft opinion leaked to Politico that would overturn landmark Roe v. Wade — exists only for one reason: the election of a celebrity, Donald Trump, whose crass and demeaning view of women was known to all.
Accused of sexual assault on numerous occasions, Trump appointed to the court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, also accused by two women of sexually assaulting them during his younger years, and then Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose anti-abortion opinions are well-documented.
The election of Trump over the more capable and experienced Hillary Clinton ushered in this era of disregard for women’s hard-fought rights. And yes, some of the males’ accomplices are women, as we saw in Florida with the bill banning most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy that made no exceptions for incest, rape or human trafficking.
It’s no coincidence that the erasure of constitutional abortion rights is happening on the heels of the historic rise of African American women in political life: Vice President Kamala Harris, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and powerful figures like Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and Florida congresswoman and former Orlando police chief Val Demings, who’s giving ultra-right demagogue Sen. Marco Rubio a run for his money in this state.
The women most likely to be affected by a Supreme Court decision against abortion would be poor Black and Hispanic women who would find it difficult to afford a trip to seek an abortion in a Democratic state where they might remain available. They certainly wouldn’t be able to go overseas, as women’s movement leader Gloria Steinem secretly did in 1957, when she went to London at age 22 after a broken engagement.
No, low-income American women in conservative states won’t have access to a good doctor’s office here or abroad.
So from an economic perspective alone, the anti-abortion movement is only a tool for those focused on keeping barefoot and pregnant a particular class of American — minority women.
Their loss of life or reproductive capacity at the hands of a botched, back-alley abortion is of no concern to the voting population that prefers a Trump to a Clinton.
As one independent, white, male Jacksonville voter recently framed the issue to me: “So the Trump thing, yes, I voted for him but by no means like him. He’s gross, corrupt and probably a white-collar criminal who has nothing but selfishness. However, when I weigh the principles and policies, plus his economic actions, he’s the better option for America.”
His selfish, well-to-do, male-centered version of America, of course.
To this independent and his GOP cohorts at the ballot box, Trump’s long-running history of immoral behavior against women didn’t make him unworthy of the American presidency.
The fact that Trump could well serve the white, male, Republican agenda of packing the Supreme Court with conservatives to carry out a wish of the ultra Christian right — to reign over women’s reproductive choices — wasn’t even a consideration.
And perhaps worse than Trump: his surrogate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who seems unstoppable on his rise to national prominence, despite his fascist policies against a raped woman’s right to an abortion, a Black person’s right to his history, and children’s needs to feel safe and accepted at school.
“We are here today to defend those who can’t defend themselves,” DeSantis recently said, at the signing of Florida’s restrictive abortion law. “This will represent the most significant protections for life that have been enacted in this state in a generation.”
But if the argument is that the would-be lives of zygotes need protection, why is the governor vowing to push, now that his power is at an all-time high, to make Florida an open-carry state for guns at the risk of great loss of life?
No, the likes of Trump and DeSantis and Justice Samuel Alito — with his assertion that the Constitution doesn’t guarantee abortion rights and Roe v. Wade “was egregiously wrong from the start” — don’t value all lives.
And there are some that they find particularly threatening to male supremacy.
Women weakened by the loss of rights at a critical, painful moment in their lives aren’t very likely to become vice presidents or Supreme Court justices or to threaten a powerful GOP senator.
