I have had so many reactions to the past 7-10 days that I would ramble, almost incoherently, to the point that I would talk myself into madness. Just ask my family. They’ll tell you.
That’s why I’m so glad we have writers like Barantunde Thurston, which can write so eloquently as the voice of calm and reason about a subject that produces such extreme reactions. The below is from a series of tweets he posted in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the United States Supreme Court. I pasted them together, so you (and I) could read them in a more prose-friendly format. It helps to bring his points into full clarity.
I implore you to read it, whichever side of this issue you’re on.
It’s not just the removal of federally-protected abortion rights that so bothers me. It’s also the justification that Justice Alito used in his opinion. In short, Alito cited the absence of abortion rights in our Constitution, written during a time when women were essentially considered property, to support the removal of abortion rights and bodily autonomy to women in the future.
Oh, the perverse circularity of this! There’s a lot we take as sacred and protected that’s not in the Constitution: Black folks as full persons, the filibuster, and cheap access to infinite internet video come to mind.
Alito’s flawed reasoning here is not unlike the tech algorithms building our future on datasets mined from our unjust past. I’m reminded, for example, of when Amazon experimented with using A.I. to screen job applicants. The algorithm looked backward to determine which traits appeared to make for a successful Amazon employee, and then filtered applicants based on those characteristics. The problem was, of course, that historically only men held those jobs at the company, so the algorithm filtered out women. Amazon automated sexism! The highly-educated legal mind of Alito has made a similar choice.
As Jill Leporte put in @NewYorker, “Alito, shocked-shocked-to discover so little in the law books of the 1860s guaranteeing a right to abortion, has missed the point: hardly anything in the law books of the 1860s guaranteed women anything. B/c, usually, they still weren’t “persons”.
History can be a guide, but it's also HISTORY for a reason—especially so in a society predicated on growth, progress, & expansion of liberty. If we can’t find liberty for certain people in the past, according to Alito, there’s no reason to find liberty for them in the future. So, let’s send Black folks back to the fields, children back to the mines, LGBTQ+ people back to the closet! What is the point of this country, of innovation, if we are so committed to the past that we use it not as a foundation to build upon, but as a prison to hold us back?
Alito seems particularly proud of himself when he writes that this decision “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.”
I heard Senator Ted Cruz saying something similar on the Sunday talk shows: “the result is not that abortion is illegal across the country. The result is that it’s up to the people, that it’s up to democracy.” Aye, there’s the rub. DEMOCRACY. This would be great if we lived in a functioning democracy. But if we lived in a functioning democracy, then the existing will of the people, those 72 percent who say a woman should govern her own body, would be respected. If we lived in a functioning democracy, the Republican Party would distance itself from the conspiratorial and lunatic rantings of a former president who refuses to accept his electoral defeat. That party would loudly decry, rather than co-sign, insurrection. That party would expand, not curtail, voting rights, because it would be eager to compete for the opportunity to represent the people. It wouldn’t spend its resources empowering party hacks to commandeer election infrastructure in order to overturn the will of future voters.
And a number of conservative justices who said during their confirmations that Roe was settled wouldn’t be voting to overturn it decades later once they achieved a majority.
(It's funny Clarence Thomas thinks the leaking of this decision destroyed the credibility of the Court. No. Judges LYING about their intentions destroyed the credibility of this Court. Why should any of us honor any rule or law or commitment after this?)
Anyway...
We don’t live in a democratic America. We live in an America in which Mitch McConnell stole a decisive SCOTUS seat from Barack Obama; in which the Electoral College still delivers on its foundational promise to disproportionally favor rural (then Southern slave-holding) states. We live in a system of minority rule where the will of the people is poorly represented by the decisions of our politicians. When Senator Cruz says, “the people” get to decide, he means people who agree with him in a system rigged to advantage those people. That is not democracy.
For all the rantings of people like Cruz and the extremists who stormed the Capitol about living under tyranny, losing their rights, and not having a voice, I can’t point to any rights that conservative white men have lost. They now have to compete in ways they didn’t have to historically, but they have more guns than ever; they dominate our politics; and too often, their minority view is our reality. Yet the majority who voted for Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, who voted for Obama & his nomination of Merrick Garland, who voted for Biden & Build Back Better, aren’t getting what we voted for.
The people who have actually lost rights these past few decades in America are non-white immigrants, Black voters, and women.
Given the stolen SCOTUS seat, increasingly misrepresentative nature of the Senate that confirms these positions, and the increasing detachment of the popular vote from presidential election outcomes, one can legitimately argue that this current Supreme Court lacks legitimacy. The current SCOTUS configuration is a result of the SUPPRESSION of the people’s will, not its expression.
We have been here before. I’m struck by the fact that we often refer to ourselves in the United States as the world’s longest-running democracy, but for most of our history, most of our people weren’t allowed to participate, so we weren’t really a democracy for all. Based on my definition, if you’re not a democracy for everyone, you’re not a democracy. When we abolished slavery, we briefly experienced Reconstruction, before welcoming Jim Crow. White women got the right to vote in 1920 and all women had their voting rights federally guaranteed only by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The government used to violently put down efforts to organize labor. I could go on. The point is we kept pushing. We adapted. People who on the surface weren’t directly affected by the problems joined and helped.
White Northerners joined freedom rides because they felt held captive by a system which would keep their fellow humans un-free. Men joined with women in a demand for equal rights even though we’ve so far failed to amend the Constitution to fully codify that equality. People organized, in the streets and at work. Just as so many women who know the pain of childbirth, or child loss, have used that pain to fight for a better world, so too must the rest of us recommit to turning the promise of America into practice at this painful moment.
That means we must invest real energy on the ground and in the states. We need to support organizations like @ARC_Southeast and @LaFronteraFund which are helping women fight for reproductive justice with education, financial assistance, advocacy and more, and we should do the same in liberal-led states who will face increased demand from health care refugees living in conservative-led states.
We need to expand our focus from national debate and campaigns to those at the state and local level and invest in organizations and candidates who are going to do a better job of representing the will of the people and stop our slide into minority rule.
We need to remember that people who think decisions about continuing or ending a pregnancy should be made by the person who is pregnant are an overwhelming majority. I repeat. WE ARE THE MAJORITY. We need to start acting like it.
And we need to acknowledge, as my colleague @PeterHamby wrote, that this theocratic backsliding was the result of a 40-year, determined, and comprehensive strategy by a passionate right wing minority that did far more than text its base demanding $15 for the upcoming midterms.
We need to do all this with passion and ferocity, but we don’t need liberal extremists to balance out conservative extremists. We need to state clearly that our goal is not simply to preserve life, but the entire trifecta of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We need to ask women and parents what they need to achieve that, and then provide it. We know some of the answers already: paid leave, childcare, livable wages, maybe getting lead out of the water.
Pew found that while a majority of Americans think stricter abortion restrictions will limit the number of abortions, even larger majorities think a better way to reduce the number of abortions is to expand sex education and increase support for pregnant women and parents.
The American people actually kind of get it. It’s the political leadership and the system that produces it that have gone rogue.
Finally, we need to acknowledge that this issue is not simple and that morality and legality are different things. From my reading of the Pew Research, even those strongly opposed to abortion on a moral basis don’t believe it should be illegal in most cases. I know women who’ve had abortions, and I can attest to the seriousness with which they’ve made that decision. It’s often emotional and difficult and painful, but it’s also something they deemed necessary. Most people don’t want to be in a position to have to choose an abortion. For some women, abortion is the only way to save their lives, and the new wave of incoming restrictions will bring new stresses and new threats.
As a friend of mine and mother of three recently told me, “Suddenly planning for my children’s future is not about saving for college—it’s finding ways to protect them from being thrown in jail for having a miscarriage.” We should not criminalize women or further isolate them. We need to trust women and close that gap between the practice and promise of this country on our path to liberty and justice for all. I think we can. I believe we must. I know it will be hard.
We will probably have to shut this entire system down in order to rebuild it on true principles of liberty, justice, and collective self love. It's clear to me things are falling apart, and what we know is coming to an end. That is terrifying, and the collapse of trust and institutions will hurt many vulnerable people. However, endings are also beginnings. And I hope we use the moment to create something worthy. In this horrific moment of multiple crises colliding, I remember @valariekaur and her call for Revolutionary Love. "Maybe the darkness we feel is not the darkness of the tomb but the darkness of the womb. Maybe America isn't dying, but being born." Maybe it's both.
End 🧵 for now. But also beginning.
