Artwork by #AnneLesniak pic.twitter.com/N75Aq86P33

— Frances Fisher (@Frances_Fisher) May 16, 2019

Women constantly have to publicly relive the worst moments of their lives – their miscarriages, abortions, rapes – just to be heard, to remind lawmakers & voters that they’re also human.

It’s so fundamentally unfair it makes you want to set fucking everything on fire.

— Rita Konaev (@RitaKonaev) May 15, 2019

The only tiny sliver of consolation is that the GOP may have ham-fisted themselves firmly into ‘Be Careful What You Wish For’ territory. Dahlia Lithwick, at Slate — “SCOTUS was all teed up to quietly gut America’s abortion rights. Then Alabama happened”:

… There are easy and near invisible ways for the high court to end Roe. That has always been, and remains, the logical trajectory. As Mark Joseph Stern has shown, when Brett Kavanaugh came onto the court, with his dog whistles and signaling around reproductive rights, it became clear that he would guide the court to simply allow states to erect more and more barriers to abortion access (dolphin-skin window coverings on every clinic!). The five justices in the majority would do it all while finding ways to say that such regulations were not an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to choose. The courts and state legislatures could continue their lilting love songs to the need for the states to protect maternal health and to help confused mommies make good choices, and nobody need dirty their hands by acknowledging that the three decades’ worth of cumbersome clinic regulations and admitting privileges laws were just pretexts for closing clinics and ending abortion altogether.

But the state of Alabama runs now to the Supreme Court with its mask of tender solicitude for women and their health askew. The briefest look at the debate as Alabama on Tuesday passed the cruelest and most punitive abortion regulation in modern American history shows exactly how much concern they have for the health of pregnant women or the suffering of future children…

Why, then, do I feel sorry for John Roberts? Because what keeps the Supreme Court in business is often the polite subterfuge of complex legal doctrine. We don’t so much suppress minority votes as protect the dignity of the states. We don’t so much enable dark money to corrupt elections as invite free speech. And we don’t so much punish women for bearing children as celebrate God and babies. This is all the kind of democracy-suppressive language the justices can get behind. It’s why Americans don’t riot on the streets…

Just as President Obama’s election exacerbated, and exposed, the ugliest racist undercurrents of modern America, Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote in 2016 unleashed the never-very-hidden misogyny and sexual terrors of entirely too many of our fellow citizens. Sunlight is not the swiftest disinfectant, but we can’t cure the rot until we can see how deeply it’s embedded.
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