If things go as awfully as they very well may in 2024, we might end up with a Republican president and Congress. Surely, this will be the result of multiple levels of GOP fuckery, from gerrymandered districts to restricted voting rights to outright refusing to accept slates of electors from states that voted for the Democrat for president. This is not idle doom prophesying. It's legitimately the plan of Republicans in order to force the majority of the country to live under its heavy, corrupt, and very white and male hand.
If that happens, I fucking promise you that one of the first orders of business will be shitcanning the filibuster in the Senate in order to ban abortion nationwide, which will be the next order of business. I would bet that abortion and the GOP's fetus fetish will be given as the imperative for the aforementioned shitcanning. And then that's it. The extremist right-wing Supreme Court would uphold the law. The Court has long wanted abortion rights to be codified by Congress. A barking mad conservative court would be hooting in pleasure to send the nation back 50 years, you know, when America was great or some such shit.
Yesterday's Supreme Court hearing in the case of Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, about the Mississippi law that cuts off abortion rights at 15 weeks, was a ghoulish display of mock sensitivity to the lives of women and the potential lives of fetuses by the conservative majority. It was a display of sadness and frustration by the three liberal justices, who were almost mourning the future they know is coming.
I mean, look at this shit. Justice Rapey McLikesbeer actually said to Mississippi's counsel, "So if you were to prevail, the majority of states or states still could and presumably would continue to freely allow abortion, many states, some states would be able to do that, even if you prevail under your view. Is that correct?" Except that nearly half the states already have laws on the books ready to ban abortion if Roe is overturned and those states contain at least half the population of the country. So, yeah, the majority of Americans would not "freely" have access to abortion.
The justice who seems most likely to jack it to snuff films, Samuel Alito, showed how little he gives a shit about women, at one point stating, "The fetus has an interest in having a life." No, motherfucker. The fetus has no interest in anything. It's a fucking fetus. Alito kept pressing Julie Rikelman of the Center for Reproductive Rights, who represented the Jackson Women's Health Organization, on abortions past the point of viability, which is generally towards the end of the second trimester. He asked, "Upon reaching the point of viability, does not the woman have the same interest that she had before viability in being free of this pregnancy, that she no longer wants to continue?" He wanted Rikelman to admit that the viability line was ever-shifting and that religious concerns weren't guiding the religious nuts like Alito who wanna force 12 year-olds to give birth to that rape baby.
Justice Amy Coney Superspreader appeared to believe that carrying a pregnancy to term, giving birth, and then giving the baby up for adoption (through "safe haven" laws that allow that) is no big deal. She said to Rikelman, "In so far as you...focus on the ways in which the forced parenting, forced motherhood would hinder women’s access to the workplace and to equal opportunities, it’s also focused on the consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy. Why don’t the safe haven laws take care of that problem?"
Rikelman must have had to fight to hide a "What the fucking fuck?" face as she responded to Justice Superspreader, shredding Mississippi's cruel indifference to pregnant women: "Pregnancy itself is unique. It imposes unique, physical demands and risk on women, and in fact has impact on all of their lives and their ability to care for other children, other family members, on their ability to work. And in particular, in Mississippi, those risks are alarmingly high. It’s 75 times more dangerous to give birth in Mississippi than it is to have a pre-viability abortion. And those risks are disproportionately threatening the lives of women of color."
In other words, equal protection under the law, motherfuckers.
That point seems to have eluded Justice Likesbeer. Like the little bitch that he is, Likesbeer kept pretending that he was protecting the integrity of the Supreme Court, which was already undermined by having Likesbeer on it. He bitched, "Why should this court be the arbiter rather than Congress, the state legislatures, state Supreme courts, the people being able to resolve this. And there’ll be different answers in Mississippi and New York, different answers in Alabama than California, because there are two different interests at stake. And the people in those states might value those interests somewhat differently. Why is that not the right answer?"
Essentially, Likesbeer is saying that it's okay to force women to have children they don't want in one state because "interests" while they don't have to in another. That's utter bullshit, and Rikelman pretty much said that: "It’s not the right answer because the Court correctly recognized that this is a fundamental right of women. And the nature of fundamental rights is that it’s not left up to state legislatures to decide whether to honor them or not. And it’s true different rules would prevail throughout the country if this court were to overrule Roe and Casey. But what that would mean is that women in those states who are refusing to honor their rights and who are forcing them to use their bodies to sustain a pregnancy, and then to bring a child into the world will have no recourse other than to travel, if they’re able to afford it, or to attempt abortion outside the confines of the medical system, or to have a child, even though that was not the best choice for them and their family." It's as good a comprehensive "shut the fuck up, person who can't give birth, just shut the fuck up" as I've heard.
The liberals really were flailing about at times. Justice Stephen Breyer tried to appeal to the principle of stare decisis, that decisions with long standing are established law. But Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Alito all made strong statements at their confirmations about honoring stare decisis, and now, especially Alito and Kavanaugh couldn't give a fuck about it. Breyer also attempted to bridge gaps between what was being litigated, the Mississippi law, and Roe v. Wade, and he just seemed out of step with the passions involved here.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor was more effective, slamming Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart, who clerked for Clarence Thomas and was a deputy attorney general for Donald Trump, so, basically, a vile shit-slinger. Stewart brought up the "fetal pain" idea as a reason to change ideas about the viability of a fetus. Sotomayor was having none of that noise: "A gross minority of doctors who believe fetal pain exists before 24, 25 weeks is a huge minority, and one not well-founded in science at all. So, I don’t see how that really adds anything to the discussion." Then she further reamed him out: "Virtually every state defines a brain death as death. Yet, the literature is filled with episodes of people who are completely and utterly brain-dead, responding to stimuli. There’s about 40% of dead people who, if you touch their feet, the foot will recoil. There are spontaneous acts by dead brain people. So, I don’t think that a response by a fetus, necessarily proves that there’s a sensation of pain or that there’s consciousness." As she usually is, Sotomayor was great, bringing up the shitty state of medical care for working class pregnant women in Mississippi, as well as telling Webster to shove his idea of when life begins up his bright white ass.
This was one of those hearings where you don't have to read the tea leaves because an air horn was blaring. The best possible outcome here is that Chief Justice John Roberts, who legit seemed queasy at the idea of completely overturning Roe being part of his legacy, convinces four of the other five dickhole conservatives to go along with his narrow decision to support the Mississippi 15-week ban and leave Roe in place, reamed out and wheezing in pain, but still there. But the other five ranged from Thomas and Alito fondling themselves under their robes as they contemplated punishing women to others bullshitting their justification for overturning Roe, all hiding a freakish, extreme Christian agenda that they were put on the court to enforce.
The clock will turn back for women in this country, and it won't be that way for women of means like Amy Coney Barrett. The fallout from overturning Roe will be bloody and brutal and played out on the bodies of women and girls, with conservatives toasting each other for their protection of fetuses while they stand on the corpses. Then they'll move on to banning it altogether because fuck all of us.
