It has always been about who gets to control women's bodies

Pro-abortion march in 1966.

The New York Times printed this headline today: “How Roe Warped the Republic.”  Granted it was on the op ed page and it was above a column written by the myopic navel-gazing theocrat Ross Douthat, but think about what those words say for a moment:  A Supreme Court decision that recognized a Constitutional right of women blew up a nation in which at least fifty percent of the citizenship is female. Not only was abortion not a right before Roe v Wade, it was a crime in more than half the states, and was allowed only to save the life of the mother in others. It was the end of those laws that “warped” this country.  Wow.

In Mr. Douthat’s reasoning, nothing before Roe had caused a “warp” in the nation:  Not the fact that abortion was legal in some states but a criminal act punishable by imprisonment in others; not the fact that the statutes outlawing abortion did not apply to the entire citizenship of the states where it was illegal, but in the main to women alone; not the fact that abortion had been legal nearly everywhere in the country prior to the mid-19th century, and the laws against it were passed in response to a campaign by the newly-formed American Medical Association to control who could and could not administer medical care to women; not the fact that the anti-abortion movement of the 19th Century was anti-feminist at its core, seeking to control women’s sexual morality and behavior and keep them out of medical schools and the practice of medicine; and most especially not the fact that anti-abortion laws criminalizing the practice were part of a larger movement by white, male legislators to suppress women who had been agitating for political power.

None of this history before the establishment of a woman’s Constitutional right to abortion, according to Mr. Douthat, amounted to an essentially unequal application of the laws in the United States. Those laws included the Comstock laws of 1873, passed by the Congress during the anti-abortion fervor of the late 19th Century.  What were the Comstock laws, Mr. Douthat might ask?  They were a series of laws to criminalize the trade in and circulation of obscenity, contraceptives, instruments or drugs used in abortions including abortifacient herbs, sex toys, and any information regarding any of the forbidden items.  Similar laws were soon passed by many states, followed by additional laws that exempted licensed physicians – read:  white male doctors -- by according doctors, and doctors alone, the right to prescribe abortifacients for “bona fide” medical or surgical purposes.  In other words, the medical profession reserved for itself the right to make decisions that had for decades, even centuries, been the domain of women to make for themselves, and in the case of midwives and herbal medicine practitioners, for each other.

See where I’m going with this?  And see where Douthat’s entire screed went?  It has always been about who gets to control women’s bodies and nothing else.

Prior to Roe, according to Douthat, everything was on an even keel and all was well with the world because it was men who had the power to determine who could and could not end a pregnancy.  Roe v Wade was the great disrupter of a system that came into being in the 1800’s because white men felt their power being threatened by the emergence of women in the political sphere, a movement that would finally bear fruit when women achieved the right to vote in 1920 after nearly a century of protest and agitation.  The arch-conservatives on the Supreme Court as well as fellow-travelers like Douthat are cognizant of the fact that they will never be able to amend the Constitution to take away women’s right to vote, but after 50 years of trying, they are ready to do what is by their lights the next best thing – cancel the hard-won right for women to have reproductive control over their own bodies. 

Watch what they do next: A series of new Comstock-style laws will be passed outlawing sending abortifacient drugs through the mails just as was done in 1873, outlawing the aiding and abetting of abortion by contributing to women traveling from non-abortion states to states where it is legal (as Texas has already done and other states are attempting to do), outlawing the sharing of information about where to obtain an abortion, even outlawing the sale and shipment of contraceptives.  It will be the whole Comstock lot all over again.

Douthat contends that the Roe decision, coming exactly 100 years after the Comstock laws were passed, “did so much to divide our parties and delegitimize our institutions.”  He’s right about at least that much.  Roe did divide us:  one of our political parties recognizes women’s place in the moral and political life of the nation, and one political party does not.  And Roe did upset the institutions that had previously been controlled by men -- the sexual dominance of husbands over wives, men over women, and medical science over women’s bodies.  

What really bothers Douthat and at least five of nine justices on the Supreme Court is this:  when you allow women the right to make decisions about their bodies, you necessarily take away the right to make that decision from someone else, and before Roe, that was men.  That’s why Justice Alito found Roe v Wade “egregiously wrong from the start.”  It took away men’s power.