Legislatively speaking

By Senator Lena C. Taylor

Since the leaked draft of a pending U.S. Supreme Court ruling regarding the future of Roe v. Wade, there’s been a lot of talk about precedents or constitutional rights. Judge Samuel Alito, a hyper-conservative judge appointed by President George W. Bush, wrote the draft majority opinion. Whether we supported it or not, many of us knew that the writing had been on the wall for some time.

Republicans’ work to pack the court, willy-nilly, with conservative justices has secured serious changes to women’s reproductive rights. Still, no one was ready for Alito to completely blow up the wall. With the precision of Stone Age hammerstones, the draft reflects an assault on women’s rights that takes us back to the most primitive times.

Alito believes that constitutional rights that are not “rooted in the history and tradition of the nation,” such as the right to abortion, are not legitimate rights at all. But…. there is documentation and support for women’s struggle to gain control over their bodies, family planning and reproductive health. Researchers have documented physical evidence of abortions prior to the birth of Christ. Alito, whose version of the story only claims to start with American history, should at least heed the observations provided by Mary Ziegler.

A well-known author on the history of abortion, Ziegler offers information that “for most of the first 100 years of American history, early abortions – before fetal ‘acceleration’ (generally defined as the moment where fetal movements can be detected) – were not illegal”. There is the Alito newspaper which could also benefit from the work done by The Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (LDHI), Hidden Voices: Enslaved Women in the Lowcountry and US South Reproduction and Resistance Their work, which documented how even enslaved women sought abortions (self-induced or not) to end unwanted pregnancies due to rape or forced reproduction. against black history and critical race theory (CRT) he may have missed that lesson in law school Okay I just wanted to work through my frustration with the CRT nonsense.

Bottom line, Alito is wrong. Regardless of the constitution and the lack of direct reference to abortion, we have ample evidence that abortions did exist and were an accepted practice in this country. In 1841, newspaper advertisements “in the New York Herald and New York Sun, show how contraception, cures for sexually transmitted diseases, abortifacients, and abortion services were advertised in New York,” according to the curators of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Until the final decision is made by the highest court in the land, Alito should at least be honest about one thing. Women have always had reproductive health decisions made for them, by men. After all, the Constitution was written by white men, for white men. The document was defective as do many writers on issues of fairness and justice.