Justice Alito Cited a 17th-Century Witch Hunter in the Dobbs Decision

Three years after Roe fell, MAGA operatives want women to focus on finding husbands.

This week marks the third anniversary of the day that Republican appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade and overturned federal constitutional protections for access to abortion. That 6-3 ruling by the Roberts Court upheld Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban and unleashed a wave of abortion restrictions in states with Republican-dominated legislatures – with men as the majority – which have sought to overturn citizen initiatives – with women as the majority of voters who supported such referenda – that try to protect access to abortion.

Three years later, the public backlash continues to percolate against the despicable Supreme Court opinion written by Samuel Alito, an arrogant right-wing ideologue who had the audacity to cite Matthew Hale as one of his sources for restricting American women’s reproductive freedoms. Who exactly was Hale? He was an English judge who, over 300 years ago, presided over the trials of women accused of witchcraft (based on utterly ridiculous claims), sentencing them to death and creating the playbook for the violence of the Salem witch trial hysteria in Massachusetts.

That’s right: Sam Alito used the judicial analysis of a 17th-century witch hunter who absurdly claimed witches had to be real because there were laws against witchcraft. Hale, by the way, also decreed that husbands could never be guilty of raping their wives because husbands and wives are one person – that person being the husband, of course – under law, in his twisted analysis.

Say Their Names

Now, the rights of 21st-century Americans are governed by a judicial opinion built on rancid misogyny. Alito’s ruling is already proving to be deadly for some women, like Amber Thurman, a pregnant woman who died from septic shock just two months after Roe was reversed. Doctors in Georgia delayed providing her an abortion because the state’s law makes it a crime for doctors to perform abortions after six weeks unless they find an emergency exists.

Later this week, another Georgia woman, Adriana Smith, will be buried four months after she was declared brain dead. The hospital overrode her family’s wishes and kept her other organs functioning through machines until they could perform a c-section four months later because she was nine weeks pregnant when she died – another result of that state’s incredibly cruel law.

These and other anti-abortion measures elevate so-called “fetal rights” over women’s rights, and the anti-abortion zealots are not done yet. They are expanding their efforts to bar access to medication abortion – to mifepristone – even though that medicine has been proven in numerous scientific studies to be safe. The Trump administration is also considering revoking FDA approval of mifepristone, and anti-abortion operatives are doing everything they can to block access to abortion, including efforts by Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) to repeal the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (which I wrote about last week).

Meanwhile, the NYT Gives Some Big Boosts to “Natalism”

This week, the New York Times featured Trump’s Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, a former lumberjack and reality TV star who is eagerly promoting Americans having more kids. Duffy has outlandishly suggested that federal highway dollars not be spent where more people live – and where roads are congested – but be allocated based on the number of kids people are having.

The Times describes Duffy as advancing the “pronatalist” movement. That’s a ten-dollar word for the obsession white right-wingers have with (white) birthrates. A few years back, before the Dobbs decision overruled Roe, former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) was at CPAC envisioning what he called the “post-Roe” world and the need to provide paid family and medical leave because soon more (white) women would be having more babies. It turns out that in Texas, it is Latina women whose birth rate has increased post-Roe, and more teenage girls of all races and ethnicities are giving birth than before the Dobbs edict allowed that array of restrictions in the state.

Meanwhile, also reporting from Texas, the Times gave glowing coverage to the most recent right-wing conference advancing natalism, where speakers urged women to get married young and have babies instead of pursuing fulfilling careers. The profile of that meeting of 3,000 young women (predominately white women, based on the photos accompanying the story) was silent on how the founder of the group sponsoring the conference – Charlie Kirk, the leader of Turning Point USA, an opportunistic guy who didn’t graduate from college – has become very well-funded for his anti-college agenda while also promoting rank conspiracy theories in service of Donald Trump’s repressive policy agenda. This spring, Kirk and TPUSA targeted the Wisconsin Supreme Court race – and lost, alongside Elon Musk. That race was in part about abortion access.

Husbands First?

As the Times reported, Kirk said the only degrees women should be pursuing are “MRS degrees.” He asked the thousands of young women listening to him and his pageant-winning wife at the conference:

“‘How many of you, every single day, is your purpose for being finding a husband?’

“Mr. Kirk sat onstage with his wife Friday night and drove home the weekend’s message. He looked out over the room, where to his dismay not everybody was raising their hands. ‘Every hand should then go up,’ he said.”

Make no mistake: Kirk, Duffy, and their regressive gang want women only in the kitchen and the nursery, not the courtroom, the boardroom, or traveling the world pursuing their dreams. They do not want them to have access to abortion or real control over their destiny. As Kirk’s speeches proclaimed, according to the Times’ summary, “Success for MAGA would be if moms stayed at home.” American girls and women deserve better than a life of subservience to husbands, as glamorized by MAGA/MAHA influencers getting rich selling a glossy 21st-century version of 16th to 18th-century womanhood.

They – we – deserve true freedom. And that fundamental freedom – which women have been denied for most of history, encompassing an array of repression from the terrifying hysteria of the witch trials (which cost women their lives) to modern-day abortion bans (which also cost women their lives) – is a core part of what this whole fight is all about.

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What I’m reading:

• Actually, I’m watching Season 6 of The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu.

  • I forced myself to start the series in Trump’s first team, even though it cut far too close to home. Now, I’m catching up on the final season of Joan’s rebellion and awaiting the sequel series, called The Testaments.

• We Should All Be Feminists, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

  • This short book is a must-read novella based on her inspiring TED Talk. It’s also worth re-watching the amazing monologue from the brilliant Barbie movie, whose director and actors got robbed of deserved Oscars.

• And, of course, the U.S. Constitution.

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