Everybody’s been talking about the comments Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas made during his portion of the Dobbs decision. You know, where he basically said birth control and gay marriage are up next.
What’s your take?
A. Very, very worried he’s right.
B. Comforted by the fact that the other justices in the majority didn’t seem to agree.
C. This whole thing is … aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh.
OK, stop banging your head against the wall. Nothing is going to be made better by putting welts on your forehead.
And because I can see how crazy this is making you, I will refrain from mentioning that Donald Trump quickly dispatched a fundraising email taking credit for the Roe decision, which began, “You’re welcome.”
Not to be outdone, Mike Pence’s folks sent out a video highlighting his longtime effort to defund Planned Parenthood. In one small way this is sort of a relief. Really, we’ve had to be grateful to Pence for his role in officially recognizing the results of the presidential election for ages now. Time to get back to remembering him as Mr. Abstinence Only.
The other justices dissociated themselves from Thomas’ predictions about Repressions for Tomorrow, but face it — politicians and political activists who’ve built their careers fighting women’s right to choice won’t declare victory, retire and suddenly take up knitting.
They’ve already started their next moves. Tennessee’s ban on abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy went into effect soon after the decision overturning Roe came down. Lawmakers in some states have started targeting morning-after pills and IUDs.
Where do they want to take us? Think about what the world was like back when women had little or no ability to control reproduction. There was, of course, the spinsterhood option. But as much as later generations venerated Susan B. Anthony, her way of life didn’t have widespread appeal. Most went for marriage, which generally meant centering your life around making your husband happy and your house spick-and-span.
Anything else was … selfishness. “There is such a struggle among women to become artists that I wish some of their gifts could be illustrated in clean, orderly, beautiful homes,” sniffed Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Who nevertheless teamed up with Anthony after discovering a life dedicated to domesticity was boring her to tears.
Totally understandable, however, that most women earlier in our history would yearn to be homemakers. By the middle of the 19th century the cities were filling up with lower-income women putting in 13 or 14 hours a day on the job. One of them, Hester Vaughn, became a feminist cause. As suffragists told her story, she was raped by her employer in Philadelphia, left pregnant and abandoned in one cold attic room with no food. Eventually she went into labor alone and was found lying on the floor next to her dead baby. She was tried for infanticide and sentenced to be hung, then finally pardoned by the governor. Becoming an excellent example of the need for an abortion option.
Maybe it’s not fair to pin Hester Vaughn’s fate on Clarence Thomas, but we ought to look back at the time he seems to feel was a golden era in reproductive rights. We’re talking about the land before Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court ruling in 1965 that held, in part, that it was unconstitutional for states to ban the sale of contraceptives.
At the time, anyone convicted of using a birth control device in Connecticut — even a married couple already raising six kids — could be sentenced to up to a year in prison. In one of the very few times the matter ever came up for official debate in the state legislature, The Times reported a motion to change the law was defeated on a voice vote that “took less than a minute.”
When it came to abortion, the whole country was talking about Sherri Finkbine, the host of a children’s TV show in Arizona. She was pregnant with her fifth child in 1962 when she discovered that a sedative her husband had brought back from an overseas trip contained thalidomide, and that she’d taken enough to cause damage to the fetus.
Finkbine scheduled an abortion, but she felt obliged to let the world know how dangerous those sedatives could be. Her attempt to be an anonymous source was a total failure, and when her story became public, the hospital canceled her procedure, the courts refused to give her any support and she lost her job hosting “Romper Room.”
Finally, after a lot of publicity, she succeeded in getting an abortion in Sweden, where the physician who performed the procedure said the fetus was massively deformed. But when she returned home, she discovered she’d been deemed “unfit to work with children” by a local TV station.
Obviously things are different now. Nevertheless, overturning Roe has pushed us back in time, and before we get shoved any further it’s a good idea to remember that control over reproduction is at the absolute center of the story of women in the modern world.
When it came to things like employment and careers, the great, cosmic dividing line between men and women was always that employers didn’t have to worry about men becoming pregnant. Then along came contraception. Everything changed and a father who dreamed about having his child take over the family business didn’t fall into despair when he heard the baby was going to be a girl. Soon, new mothers had the joy — and yeah, the challenge — of knowing they’d be able to mesh parenthood with careers of their own.
While nobody’s admitting it, this is what the anti-choice movement wants to retract. Let’s remind the Supreme Court of it every day.
Gail Collins is a New York Times columnist.
