The End of Roe (and Privacy as Well)

So much has already been written on the leaked draft majority opinion by Justice Alito in the Mississippi abortion case,  it's time to look back and forward -- back to understand the deep vein of misogyny that has driven much abortion policy in the past century, and forward to see where abortion policy is headed and what can be done to preserve what the Supreme Court has understood to be a fundamental right for 49+ years: the decision, as Justice Brennan so delicately phrased it in his  1972 majority opinion in Eisentstadt v. Baird, "whether to bear or beget a child."

There are lots of pathways back to pre-Roe misogyny. To state the obvious, that's not to say misogyny ended with Roe, but there is a specific version of it that is recognizable today and therefore still important to understand going forward. One way back is an essay by Adrienne Rich in the New York Review of Books, which recently posted the essay (without a paywall) on its website with these words:

In the Review’s October 2, 1975, issue, Adrienne Rich wrote about “The Theft of Childbirth,” tracing the patriarchal history of obstetrics—and “the technology of childbirth”—and finding that “the value of a woman’s life would appear to be contingent on her being pregnant or newly delivered. Women who refuse to become mothers are not merely emotionally suspect, they are dangerous.”

The path forward (assuming, as seems reasonable, that the Alito draft is fairly close to the final version that we will see later this Term) is littered with legal questions and controversies. I am working on a short piece for the SMU Law Review "Forum" on state restrictions on medical abortions, something I described in March as a legislative "pincer movement" intended to end all abortions in Texas and elsewhere without enacting an outright ban (though Texas and at least 12 other states have so-called "trigger" laws at the ready for the inevitable demise of Roe [NY Times, May 4; Politico, May 3 (23 states have pre-Roe prohibitions or trigger laws]). More on that topic in a subsequent post.