POPE ALITO LIES: ABORTION HAS ALWAYS BEEN HIS STORY, AND NOW ANOTHER MORAL DILEMMA FOR BLEEDING KANSAS

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization – where the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade –– Justice Samuel Alito deploys arguments based on cherry-picked historical precedents.

Writing for the conservative majority, he uses the phrase “history and tradition” regularly, pointing out that there has been a "tradition" against abortion dating back to English common law and western history.

This is disingenuous, even for a Supreme Court justice who should know better. It assumes that "society" has been against it, even though the facts show otherwise. But for Alito, the 19th century looks like the true golden age.

He wrote: “In 1803, the British Parliament – without a single female member – made abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy and authorized the imposition of severe punishment...In this country during the 19th century, the vast majority of the States enacted statutes criminalizing abortion at all stages of pregnancy...By 1868, the year when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified,” Alito concludes, “three-quarters of the States, 28 out of 37, had enacted statutes making abortion a crime.”

Alito conveniently overlooks the fact that women had little – if any – input into the "rules" of society. In fact, for the majority of the time, women were not allowed to vote, to testify in court, or to write law. History was just that, HIS story.

As late as 1884 Belva Lockwood was then first woman admitted to practice law before Alito's U.S. Supreme Court, and then ran for president on the Equal Rights Party Ticket; she did so again in 1888.
And ten yeas later, on 1894 the first three women elected to a state legislature in the country were Clara Cressingham (R), Carrie C. Holly (R), and Frances Klock (R), all in the Colorado House of Representatives.

And it wasn't until the next century that Jeannette Pickering Rankin (June 11, 1880 – May 18, 1973) a women's rights advocate, became the first woman to hold federal office in the United States. She was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican from Montana in 1916, and again in 1940.

Even the right to vote, never mind to hold public office, was won by women after 72 years of struggle, when the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, passed by Congress June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920.

And 13 years later, Frances Perkins became the first woman appointed to a presidential Cabinet when she was sworn in as Secretary of Labor on March 4, 1933.

Maurizio Valsania, of the Università di Torino, in the The Conversation, said that Alito and the conservative majority appear to be spellbound by the 19th century. To them, he wrote, the 19th century looks like the true golden age.

Valsania argues that Alito "in his rather selective forays into history, doesn’t ask a set of fundamental questions: Why was abortion eventually criminalized during that time? What was the broad cultural and intellectual context of that period? And, more important, is there something peculiar about the 19th century?

"As far as women’s bodies and abortion are concerned, the 19th century saw a decrease in the trust in, and power of, women themselves."

To begin with, 17th- and 18th-century legal authorities Edward Coke, Matthew Hale, and William Blackstone had all advocated for or condoned abortion. They fretted only when the procedure was carried out after “ quickening" the moment when the mother realizes that the fetus moves in her womb, approximately the fourth month of pregnancy.

Even Benjamin Franklin inserted an abortion recipe in a popular textbook he republished in Philadelphia in 1784, and it didn't prompt any scandal.

Now, as a result of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, voters in Kansas will decide whether to remove protection of women on their decision concerning abortion. Ironically, Kansas was also the battleground for another moral issue, slavery. If "tradition and history" had been followed, slavery would have been imposed upon the state. It took a martyr like John Brown to cleanse the national soul of that evil through sacrifice.

Anti-abortion campaigns, Valsania wites, "began in earnest in the mid-19th century. They were waged mostly by the American Medical Association, founded in 1847, and were fundamentally anti-feminist.

"In the Dobbs decision, Alito says: 'The Court finds that the right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the nation’s history and tradition.' This is a historical fact: Protection of the right to abortion wasn’t around in America before Roe.

"But it is also an incomplete picture of the full story. The criminalization of abortion, plus the decentralization of the woman’s experience, plus the medicalization of her feelings that led to that decision, are facets that belong to the long-gone 19th century.

"No American lives in that century any more – not even Justice Alito."