Citizens No More

[maestrob]

June 28, 2022
By Tressie McMillan Cottom
Opinion columnist


Roe has been doctrine my entire life. When I graduated high school, the senior year photographs were included in a memory book. One of the pages invited us to imagine our careers and salary 10 years in the future. I predicted I would be a lawyer earning a very realistic $35,000 a year. I was not stupid. I knew that race and gender might make that much harder to achieve. It never occurred to me that I should temper my aspirations because I was a girl.

In one lifetime, Roe had pushed women so fully into the paid labor market that it was normal for high school seniors to be asked to answer a genderless prompt about their economic aspirations. Flipping through that book today feels like reading a fairy tale, the old Grimms’ ones and not the new Disney ones.

I grew up choosing where and how I work because Roe v. Wade gave me many of the same basic rights of personhood as men, for example. Millions of women have, to different degrees, been able to do the same.

With Roe v. Wade toppled, we do not have the same rights in all labor markets. In a global market, an empowered worker is one who can migrate. With Dobbs, women cannot assume that we can safely work in Idaho the same way that we can in Oregon or Washington. I cannot negotiate wages or time off with an employer with the same risk profile as those who cannot become pregnant. An employer who offers lower pay in a state with abortion care indirectly benefits from women’s inability to take our labor on the open market across the nation. Thanks to a rogue court, women’s lives are now more determined by the accidents of our birth than they were a week ago.

Those accidents of birth include circumscribing women’s lives by making them dependent upon corporate beneficence. Some companies, including Dick’s Sporting Goods, immediately issued statements that they would offer reimbursements to employees for traveling for abortion services. The largess of Dick’s and other companies is noteworthy. But it requires women to disclose their health status to a boss they have to hope is well meaning. That says nothing of also hoping that corporate management or leadership does not change. Well-meaning employers can come and go. They also vary in how well meaning they are in terms of pledges of their employee support.

Months before the decision was officially handed down, Starbucks also issued a statement vowing support for employees who seek abortion care. But its statement adds that it cannot guarantee that benefit to workers in unionized stores. Union drives at Starbucks have increased worker power. Many of those workers are women and people who can become pregnant. Potentially attaching support for abortion care to nonunionized labor is a perfect example of why corporations should not be arbiters of human rights.

The majority opinion in Dobbs argues that it is merely making the right to an abortion a state’s decision. In reality, the justices are making it a corporation’s privilege. A society cannot be held together when half of a population has to rely so heavily on the kindness of strangers to do something as basic as work.

Economics, labor and jobs matter for more reasons than money. Jobs and income are the basic units of U.S. citizenship, in practice. Jobs are how we earn dignity. Income is one way we fund the state, through taxes and production. Jobs are also how the state provisions its responsibility to us, by relying on employers to deliver goods like health care and social security.

For only 58 years of the nation’s 246-year-old economy, women have been able to avail themselves — thanks to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act — of the full citizenship that we effectively purchase through our jobs. We have been able to migrate from the South to the North and the West, seeking better wages and more opportunity. Abortion access afforded women more and better economic opportunities, and those economic opportunities made women more viable in the eyes of the law. We have cobbled together economic opportunity, albeit for less pay than men, yes. But any paid work made us more free by making us more whole in the eyes of courts and institutions.

Today we pay a greater price for that freedom than do men. And it is a price that our children will inherit. Many of the people who celebrate the Dobbs decision are nostalgic for a pre-World War II American economy. That economy kept women from competing with men in the paid labor market. It also relied on unions to protect working-class men’s incomes. That economy is gone. This economy will not magically provide good jobs and good wages for men who will pass that on to their wives and children.

As a Black woman, I inherited the debts that white racism exacted upon the livelihoods of my grandparents and great-grandparents and their great-grandparents. I know well what that inheritance feels like. It makes your life poorer. It makes your communities poorer. And it dooms a society.

That we are all less free than we were on Thursday is, even by now, a cliché. But in fact that is more true for poor women and trans men than for others. Do not mistake the specific harm for localized harm. When women cannot move freely across this nation, sure that they have basic human rights as they migrate, we are all anchored to the poverty of their choices.

There are even worse days ahead. By all accounts, the overturning of Roe v. Wade is just the beginning of decisions that could reverse hard-won human rights for all Americans. Justice Clarence Thomas indicated that L.G.B.T.Q rights, birth control access and health care privacy may be in the court’s cross hairs.

I am still reeling from waking up in a new world. But that feeling cannot solidify into inertia. We can and should donate to organizations that provide abortion services in local communities. At the same time, donations will not save us. Consumer citizenship has trained us to think about our politics as a set of transactions that we can purchase like we do a car or a new pair of shoes. Restoring human rights will require direct political engagement and tremendous resistance. I am not particularly hopeful.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority decision. Journalist Stephanie Mencimer wrote in Mother Jones that it was always “going to be Alito” who would write the majority decision. Alito says that the court cannot be concerned with how its decisions affect people. Linda Greenhouse in The Times described the opinion as arrogant. I expect arrogance from a conservative court. It is more important to me that the decision is so bold.

This is a court unafraid of the electorate and unashamed of showing its hand. The emperor does not care that he wears no clothes. Nancy Pelosi reads a poem. President Biden issued a tepid commitment to women’s rights. No one seems afraid of the people. That is the people’s fault.

The fight now shifts to the states, where many legal scholars do not know how to interpret this new reality. Some states are struggling with who has what authority. Other states want to refuse to enact Dobbs’s dictates but do not know how. We should be there to determine what a life after Roe v. Wade will look like. It will be hard. Setbacks are certain. But there is no other way forward and so many ways backward.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/28/opin ... -more.html

[Rach3]

Would be hard to make this up , but since Trump anything is possible.From WAPO yesterday:

Yesli Vega — the GOP nominee in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District vying to unseat Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) — drew outrage Monday after audio published by Axios Richmond appeared to capture her theorizing inaccurately about why rape might not lead to pregnancy in a conversation about abortion and exceptions to abortion bans.

Vega’s comments perhaps mark the opening salvo in the role abortion policy will play in the 7th District race following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade — a development that political analysts have anticipated could energize Democratic voters in a midterm election year in which Republicans have claimed much of the momentum.

And Vega’s remarks, political scientist Stephen Farnsworth said, immediately “add fuel to that fire.” Her comments elicited swift condemnation from Virginia Democrats and drew comparisons to other Republican politicians who infamously tanked their campaigns after making controversial comments about abortion and rape.

Axios published the audio Monday and said it came from a campaign event in Stafford County last month. The outlet said the tape captured an exchange between Vega, who is a Prince William County supervisor, and an unknown person who suggested to Vega, “I’ve actually heard it’s harder for a woman to get pregnant if she’s been raped. Have you heard that?”

Vega responded: “Well, maybe because there’s so much going on in the body, I don’t know. I haven’t seen any studies. But if I’m processing what you’re saying, it wouldn’t surprise me, because it’s not something that’s happening organically. Right? You’re forcing it.”

The recording released by Axios begins with Vega, an auxiliary Prince William County sheriff’s deputy and former Alexandria police officer, drawing on her own anecdotal experience as a law enforcement officer with rape and pregnancy.

“The left will say, ‘Well, what about in cases of rape or incest?’ ” Vega said, apparently referring to exceptions to abortion bans in those cases. “I’m a law enforcement officer. I became a police officer in 2011. I worked one case where, as result of a rape, the young woman became pregnant.”

Then the unidentified person asked Vega if she had heard it’s harder for rape victims to get pregnant. As Vega explained why she thought that could be true, the woman added in agreement: “Exactly. Like, the body shuts down in some way.”

“Yeah, yeah. And the individual, the male is doing it as quickly — it’s not like, you know — so I can see why maybe there’s truth to that,” Vega responded.

Rape can and does lead to pregnancy. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that nearly 3 million American women have experienced rape-related pregnancy, citing a 2018 paper that conducted the first review and survey of rape-related pregnancy in two decades. Abortions stemming from rape are uncommon, according to recent studies, with the Guttmacher Institute estimating that just 1 percent of abortions follow a rape and a 2015 Chicago survey of more than 19,000 women at two health-care clinics offering abortion finding just 1.9 percent got an abortion because of rape.

The CDC also notes that only between 5.2 percent and 26 percent of rape victims report their rape, depending on the identity of the perpetrator.

The Washington Post requested an interview with Vega, including to ask questions about her positions on abortion policy in post-Roe America. She did not agree to an interview, instead sending a statement through a campaign spokesman that did not touch on her positions on abortion or her comments.

“Liberals are desperate to distract from their failed agenda of record high gas and grocery prices, and skyrocketing crime,” she wrote. “For all the left-wing bloggers and media, as a mother of two children, yes I’m fully aware of how women get pregnant.”

She then accused Spanberger of lying, although Vega did not say what about, and called her position on abortion “extreme.” A campaign spokesman did not immediately respond to questions about what Vega was referring to or to answer specific questions about Vega’s positions on a national abortion ban or about exceptions in cases of rape, incest and when a mother’s life is at risk, among other questions.

In a statement to The Post, Spanberger said Vega’s comments in the audio published by Axios were “devoid of truth, shamefully disrespectful toward victims of rape, and clearly indicate that she is not qualified to be making serious policy decisions on behalf of our fellow Virginians.”
“I will continue to work tirelessly to ensure a woman’s right to choose and the fundamental right to privacy,” Spanberger said.

State Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D), the president pro tempore of the Senate, in a tweet called Vega “a complete disgrace to everyone else wearing that uniform.” Susan Swecker, the chairwoman of the Virginia Democratic Party, called Vega’s comments “deeply hateful, offensive and an insult to all rape victims.”
“Vega’s indefensible comments have no place in Congress,” Swecker said in a statement. “The contrast could not be more clear between Yesli Vega and Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, who is a staunch defender of a woman’s right to choose and the fundamental right to privacy.”

Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington, anticipated Democrats would make these comments a central rallying cry against Vega for the remainder of the campaign, especially given how last week’s overturn of Roe is “going to turbocharge Democratic voters.” He called her comments “very damaging” to her prospects in the swing district, which is anchored in Prince William County and the Fredericksburg area and is a district that both President Biden and Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) won.

Farnsworth and others noted the 2012 Senate campaign of Missouri’s Todd Akin tanked after Akin claimed inaccurately that it was “really rare” for pregnancy to occur after rape and that “the female body” would be able to “shut down” a “legitimate rape.”

“If the Democrats drop this issue between now and November, they’d be guilty of malpractice,” Farnsworth said. “Even in a red state like Missouri, a place far more conservative than the 7th District of Virginia, a comparable comment was poisonous to the Akin campaign.”

Vega’s position on Roe has been unambiguous. She cheered the leaked draft Supreme Court ruling in May and celebrated Friday when the ruling overturning the constitutional right to abortion officially came down, saying she was glad the power to decide abortion policy “was returning to the state where we have a pro-life Governor at the helm.”

But she has not been as clear about specific abortion policies she would support. According to Axios, she expressed support for a 15-week ban like the one Youngkin is pushing for but did not answer directly when asked if she would support a nationwide ban.

At an event in May observed by a Post reporter, Vega and several other candidates were asked what they would do about abortion in Congress.

Vega started by saying she agreed with everything two candidates before her had said. One, David Ross, a Spotsylvania County board supervisor, said he would support a bill declaring life begins at conception. Crystal Vanuch, the chair of the Stafford County board of supervisors, said she believed abortion policy should be left up to states.

Vega then said that “when you talk to people on the other side of the aisle about abortion, you have to know what you’re talking about,” before expressing apparent support for the Texas abortion law that banned abortion after six weeks; the state is now slated to ban all abortion.
“When we talk about the Texas bill, what does that bill say and mean, that if a heartbeat is detected, you can’t what? You can’t kill that baby. You can’t,” Vega said. “And most people don’t know this. All they know is general talking points — I don’t want old White men controlling my body. My body my choice. Where was that same rhetoric when they were trying to mandate vaccines on we the people?”