And then there's Griswold

If Roe is overturned no doubt the anti-women’s-reproductive-rights zealots would go after Griswold next. Their agenda is clear; control women’s reproductive choices by restricting and even outlawing them as much as possible. Women are just baby-assembly-lines to them after all. Overturning not only Roe but also Griswold would directly intrude within the lives of women and violate their privacy rights, and that’s exactly what the anti-choice/anti-contraception ideologues want more than anything out of this Supreme Court nomination battle.

ABORTION ISN’T the only reproductive right at stake in the fight over who will replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court. There’s also birth control.

The short version of history is that in 1973, the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling said that a woman could terminate her pregnancy because of a constitutional right to privacy.[…]

A key case in this history is Griswold v. Connecticut, a legal battle over birth control.[…]

In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled that Connecticut’s law was unconstitutional because it trampled the privacy rights of married couples. After the ruling, Connecticut’s married women got access to birth control.

In the ruling, Justice William O. Douglas wrote, ”We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights – older than our political parties, older than our school system.”

Connecticut was not alone in strapping tough laws on birth control. Massachusetts law banned the sale of contraceptives to unmarried women until 1972, when the Supreme Court ruled that treating married and single people differently was a violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

If members of a newly constituted Supreme Court unravel Roe v. Wade, they could undermine the right to privacy and access to birth control. If this happens, other attacks could gain force, including the current cases of pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions because of their personal values. The nonprofit advocacy organization NARAL Pro-Choice America points to refusals made this year in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.[…]

Americans should work to make abortion as rare as possible. But if the government revokes women’s abortion rights, it would have excessive control over people’s lives.

And if abortion rights are dismantled and contraception is banned, women’s lives will be completely under the rule of their own government. The precedent would be set; women are birthing chattel on command and women’s sexuality is strictly for procreation–not personal pleasure (and it would be a commodity for men’s enjoyment). Women’ s identity would be solely synonymous as a means of reproduction. Not to mention there will be more unwanted pregnancies, more unwanted children (which will overwhelm our welfare state–there, that’s what the Republicans get for their anti-woman, anti-choice politics, ha-ha), and more women resorting to all sorts of sometimes horrible and tragic measures in order to end an unwanted pregnancy (ie: fatal back alley abortions, clothes hangers, etc.). Or even giving birth and then abandoning the unfortunate newborn infant in a dumpster. And women who have miscarriages would be investigated in order to make sure that they didn’t induce it on purpose (imagine it, a ‘CSI: Fetus’ and the setting is always within a woman’s uterus).

Oh but the wealthy women in this country need not fear the prospect of the overturnings of Roe and Griswold. I’m sure–especially if they’re the wife or girlfriend or daughter of a politician–they’ll always be able to obtain safe abortions and contraception. But for the rest of us (women), our basic fundamental rights as autonomous human beings would be revoked. Not that it matters because hey–we’re women and our rights only exist when they’re convenient for the [mostly male] lawmakers. This is about women’s privacy and restricting it as much as possible in order to make sure that they ‘fulfill their biological and sacrosanct duties as women‘, as the uber-conservative Christian Rightwing’s ideology would have you to believe.

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29 Responses to And then there's Griswold

  1. 1
    Josh Jasper says:

    And Lawrence. So states can go back to having sodomy laws. I bet Bush would do that.

  2. 2
    Thomas says:

    I think everyone knows that Lawrence and Roe are in the crosshairs. How do we get the antis to admit that Griswold is up for grabs, too? Because then, it’s the center’s ox that’s being gored.

  3. 3
    Jesurgislac says:

    Interesting. And how does this cross-connect with the determination to tie marriage down to meaning procreation?

  4. 4
    Amanda says:

    Well, they’ve already basically admitted that Griswold is the target by constantly bleating about how there’s no privacy rights in the Constitution. I wouldn’t be surprised if they went for Griswold first.

  5. 5
    Thomas says:

    Amanda, there’s a big difference politically between admitting that they want a constitutional interpretation that would leave contraception unprotected, and getting them to say that they want constitutional protection stripped from contraception. We make the leap, but lots of folks in the U.S. don’t connect those dots, and if we’re the ones to do the connecting, we’ll be dismissed as hysterics (a term I use advisedly).

  6. 6
    Barbara says:

    Obviously, the impact would vary a lot by state.

    Also, those of you who really want to understand the Supreme Court evolution on these issues need to go back to 1922, and read the decision of Meyer v. Nebraska, wherein the Court overturned a Nebraska statute that outlawed the teaching of German in schools, public and private, which prohibited families from trying to preserve their German heritage. This was a direct result, of course, of WWI. German was dropped from the curriculum of many schools, but to my knowledge, only one state tried to ban even the private teaching of German.

    The point is, the real issue is whether the Constitution can be read to support any discernible line between what is or must be the prerogative of individuals in controlling their private lives, and what is subject to legitimate state interest, and hence, intervention. If you take away Meyer v. Nebraska, Griswold, and Roe, you also take away the protection that, for instance, permits parents to home school their children devoid of undue state interference. You take away the rights of men to veto a decision by their SO to place a child for adoption. And so on. You can’t have this both ways. State control is state control, and if you don’t want overbearing state influnece on your own family choices, you don’t want it for others.

    The difficulty that Roe places in this mix, and that lets many pro-life advocates shrug off this nuanced analysis, is that they believe that once you introduce a new “person” or “life” into the mix, you aren’t really talking about a right of individual privacy anymore.

  7. 7
    Fielder's Choice says:

    If women are incubators, then men are hens.

    What would be required to make anyone chattel is chattel slavery. What would be required to make women birthing chattel is a network of laws and social mores binding women to men against their will, forbidding them their choice of partner and forbidding them to choose none, and:

    Forbidding them to say NO whether within marriage or without, which is what the early feminists were opposing when they used the words
    “PRO-CHOICE.”

    You like to say that you are pro-choice and pro-life. Now hear this: I am pro-life and PRO-CHOICE. I believe that abortion is abhorrent, but am against every form of sexual abuse, committed by anyone upon anyone, irrespective of gender, class, race, marital status, handicap, employment military or civilian, and sexual orientation.

    Abortion is child abuse. That’s why I oppose abortion, legal or illegal.

    That’s why I’m PRO-CHOICE.

    Even people young enough to look like colicky tissue should have choices. Since there is no choice in suicide, one can assume that they want to live.

    Banning abortion removes men and women from regarding themselves as pointless sexual objects, which is a form of mental slavery – and a woman, or a man, is a slave to whatever has mastered her or him.

    Submit not to lustful mastership.
    Having children isn’t a chore, just as it isn’t a job. It is a gift.
    Children deserve choices. Pro-life=Pro-choice.

  8. 8
    ScottM says:

    Fielder’s Choice: Argh, splutter. I’m not going to feed the troll further, but how misguided can you be? [Pro-life is pro-choice as long as some subset of choices remain? What a mockery you make of choice. Just three posts down is a very clear explanation of a pro-choice view of pregnancy– read it.]

  9. 9
    Q Grrl says:

    There is a lustful Master-ship? No wonder the revolution won’t be televised!

  10. 10
    Kyra says:

    “What would be required to make anyone chattel is chattel slavery. What would be required to make women birthing chattel is a network of laws and social mores binding women to men against their will, forbidding them their choice of partner and forbidding them to choose none . . .”

    No. That is what would be required to make women “birthing chattel” of MEN—it is not required to make them “birthing chattel” of the GOVERNMENT. Translation: Reverse Roe, reverse Griswold, and a woman’s lover can be fully supportive of her reproductive rights, but that isn’t enough to give her control over her body, if she has no access to birth control (because of the government) and no access to a safe abortion (because of the government). He can respect her rights, but he can’t ensure she has them. It’s sort of like the curfew laws that govern late-night teenage activities in some towns–like in mine, a 16-year-old has to be off the streets by eleven, EVEN if his parents allow him to stay out later, the city doesn’t.

    As to what Amanda & Thomas were discussing, I came to the same conclusion regarding that video that’s circulating in which pro-life protesters were asked what was an appropriate punishment for women who had abortions. None of them admitted to wanting a punishment appropriate for the murder that they claim it is, and I think, in that case and this, that they are lying, they are playing wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing, keeping their true agenda silent until they have the power to implement it.

    And I think it will go beyond Roe & Griswold.

    If they have the power, well, why wouldn’t they outlaw condoms as well? After all, sex is strictly for procreation, so we can’t have them being used as birth control, and everybody knows only whores have STDs, and good Republican men would of course only marry virgins, so good Republican men are in no danger of getting STDs, and everyone knows good Republican men are the only people whose rights are worth protecting!

    And what next? Well, probably somebody will point out that “Oh my God! White people are becoming a minority in our own country!” and somebody else will point out all the single mothers with several babies and the skin color of many of them, and they’ll casually ressurrect the eugenics program (a tool of bigots if one ever existed), and maybe cover up for the contradiction by jailing some of those women under the premise that since they’re not having babies anymore, they must be taking illegal birth control or having illegal abortions (this lovely double-cross would be made easier by that death-sentence case that was upheld even though the defense attorney slept through it–I guess you don’t have the right to an attorney, after all, or at least one that’s stronger than the attorney’s right to a nap!), and maybe while they’re at it, how about giving white women an incentive to have white babies and put them up for adoption? Or, maybe, since they’re women, instead of an incentive, how about a penalty for not living up to their biological duty as women, hmm?

    Yeah. I know I sound like a conspiracy nut today. But the anti-choicers have already put controlling women ahead of the “unborn lives” they allegedly value so much–where do you think privacy, freedom, & equality will fall on the list? They’re conservatives, remember?

    Lovely wake-up call, P-A. Good morning to you too. *half-grumpy, but sincere about the good-morning part*

  11. 11
    Amanda says:

    Amanda, there’s a big difference politically between admitting that they want a constitutional interpretation that would leave contraception unprotected, and getting them to say that they want constitutional protection stripped from contraception. We make the leap, but lots of folks in the U.S. don’t connect those dots, and if we’re the ones to do the connecting, we’ll be dismissed as hysterics (a term I use advisedly).

    True. I have no idea how to provoke them into telling the truth, though. Interesting, isn’t it, how so many self-proclaimed moralists have no problems being so devious?

  12. 12
    alsis39 says:

    Qgrrl wrote:

    There is a lustful Master-ship? No wonder the revolution won’t be televised!

    Actually, its secret identity is The Good Ship Lollipop. They never told Shirley Temple. Just like they never told Charleton Heston that Ben Hur was really the ex of that handsome villain in the other chariot. ;)

  13. 13
    Thomas says:

    Submit not to lustful mastership

    Toooooo easy:
    But I like submitting to lustful mastership.
    Is it mastership if I only submit to women?
    What about lustful masturbation? Are you against that, too?
    Can I still dominate lustful submissiveship?
    I didn’t know they had a whole ship! How do I enlist?

  14. 14
    NancyP says:

    The direct approach is best. Just ask, what should the penalty be for a woman seeking an abortion, what should the penalty be for the doctor performing an abortion, and how do you justify giving differential sentences? How do you plan to deal with investigation of miscarriages which could be self-induced abortions? Do you favor the block menstrual police approach taken by a few Communist countries like China (to prevent births) or Romania (to require births)?

    As for it being too nutty for us to suggest that the anti-abortion crowd wants to roll back guaranteed access to birth control, just point to Judie Brown of American Life League, one of the most frequently quoted activists. She advocates against oral contraception, claiming it is abortifacient. She doesn’t do so in mainstream press, but she sure does in her press releases.

  15. 15
    'stina says:

    Used to be that I thought that A Handmaid’s Tale was a story feminists used to tell their children when they were reinforcing the paridigms. Now I fear it’s the handbook for the wingnuts.

  16. 16
    ol cranky says:

    True. I have no idea how to provoke them into telling the truth, though.

    Amanda:

    Just offer them a book deal a la Santorum and then hand them a shovel after it’s published.

  17. 17
    Cala says:

    This is annoying. Without birth control, what, we’re back to not hiring women cause they’ll just end up needing time off due to babies?

    This needs to come out now, even at the risk of non-hysteria. Lots of people who are against abortion ain’t gonna be too happy with not being able to help their daughters avoid pregnancy or even planning their own families.

  18. 18
    Cala says:

    That should read “the risk of sounding hysterical”. Apparently the Pill affects my ability to type.

  19. 19
    NancyP says:

    The Handmaid’s Tale was written after Atwood spent some time in Kabul, Afghanistan. She was just transporting Afghani mainstream attitudes to Jesusland (oops, Gilead)(oops, U.S.A.).

  20. 20
    Barbara says:

    Here, in one short sentence, is why I don’t think contraception is going to be made illegal in any fell swoop: Men like having sex too much.

    For better or worse, abortion has been framed as an issue of female independence (as it indisputably is), but its liberating impact on men has been virtually ignored, frankly, because men don’t control the outcome of any individual decision (well, not directly, anyway — most of us know that in the real world, men’s views are very influential).

    Furthermore, it’s easy for many people to put abortion in a box that lets them believe it won’t happen to them, but not because they aren’t having sex (clearly, they are), but because they do use contraception.

    In short, telling people that they can’t have an abortion seems to many as not imposing a big sacrifice. Telling them they can’t have sex without risking children imposes a very large sacrifice. And this is as true for men as it is for women, even when men are themselves not responsible for arranging the contraception.

    I am not saying that there won’t be those who will try to outlaw contraception, and there may even be places where they are successful, such as in South Dakota, and it does not make me happy, it is not my desired outcome under any scenario I can possibly imagine. But I do think it comes across as a scare tactic with an unlikely outcome.

    (And another case to read along the lines of Meyer v. Nebraska is Yoder (can’t remember exact title).) Because of Roe v. Wade everyone assumes that the only “rights” protected by the notion of the constitutional right to privacy are reproductive rights. This is clearly incorrect. In my humble opinion, a catalog of “what else the state could prevent you from doing” in the event there is no constitutionally protected right of privacy would include obtaining contraception, but also, homeschooling your children, and so on.

  21. 21
    Lee says:

    Barbara, you are so right. I think we’ve gotten so used to having (relatively easily available and reliable) contraception that we’ve forgotten how we got here. Homeschooling should be a real hot-button issue for many who don’t get worked up about abortion.

  22. 22
    Thomas says:

    Barbara, you’ve hit on something that I think is often true: that coalition-building simply requires demonstrating to a lot more people that their conduct is implicated and their ox is gored.

    In theory, the dominionists want to prevent heterosexual couples from committing sodomy, too, but nobody thinks this is a danger in the near-term. However, contraception is on the chopping block right away. Potentially so is porn — Stanley v. Georgia, if memory serves, was 1969 and followed Griswold, though it predated Roe. It protects the right to possess obscene material in one’s own home even if buying or selling it is unlawful. If straight guys really believe that a roll-back of Griswold will result in a fundamentalist crackdown on their ability to download porn and masturbate to it in their own homes, they’re on the Save Griswold bus immediately.

    (I realize that some folks blanche at the idea of defending straight guy access to mainstream “woman prostituted as object for male entertainment” porn, and maybe even would rather throw Stanley overboard. Coalition-building usually involves at least enough compromise to agree to disagree.)

  23. 23
    Niels Jackson says:

    Look, with all due respect, it is idiotic to claim that the United States is at any risk whatsoever that contraception will be “banned.” According to the Washington Post, 98% of women use contraceptives at some point. 98%.

    What the heck makes you think that anyone is ever going to outlaw something that 98% of people use? No matter what happens to the “constitutional right to privacy,” contraceptives aren’t going to be outlawed any more than indoor plumbing is going to be outlawed.

  24. 24
    Thomas says:

    Niels, in part, I agree with you and that’s part of the point — the political consequences of a frontal assault on contraception are counter-mobilization and failure, and potentially the death of the evangelical right as a political force. It is because contraception is so widely used and approved of that it is important to show that attacks on the constitutional right to privacy are attacks on Griswold.

    In part, I disagree with you. The evangelical right, including some members of the Republican leadership, unambiguously oppose contraception, and in states where evangelicals are a huge voting block, don’t think that people won’t outlaw something assuming they can get it if they need it.

    Finally, only the Old Order Amish oppose indoor plumbing. They are not a significant voting block. The evangelicals oppose premarital sex, even though they virtually all have it, and I have seen no evidence that they would rather take a stand in favor of the behavior they actually engage in, rather than stand on ideology and repent in private. In fact, my experience is to the contrary — my anti-choice, clinic protesting cousin has terminated two pregnancies.

  25. 25
    Barbara says:

    You know Thomas, I would like to slap your cousin around a few times. What an incredible indulgence in cheap grace, to have two abortions and then wring your hands because the state is not permitted to coerce you into standing up for your own principles. But sadly, it’s common, way too common.

  26. 26
    Thomas says:

    But wait! There’s more!

    The principal reason for the termination was that …

    (this is so awful that it requires a dramatic pause)

    The sperm-injector was inconveniently African-American!

    (Nobody has ever seen me write much I love and respect my mother’s family. There’s a reason for that.)

  27. 27
    Niels Jackson says:

    The evangelical right, including some members of the Republican leadership, unambiguously oppose contraception,

    That’s baloney. Some Catholics oppose contraception (although without calling for legislation against it), and a very few fundamentalists oppose it (again, without calling for legislation against it), but it is absolutely false that evangelicals generally oppose contraception. Heck, if you go to the average evangelical marriage counseling class, they’ll happily tell you to use birth control to space out your children, to spend a few years getting used to each other, etc., etc.

    Your remark is just as wildly inaccurate as saying that Catholics oppose women wearing pants.

  28. 28
    Barbara says:

    Evangelicals unambiguously oppose premarital sex and could likely be counted on to prohibit the sale of contraception to the unmarried. Most protestants, including evangelicals, do not oppose the use of contraception within marriage. The RC Church limits its opposition to the legality of contraception based on whether it deems it to be, even in theory, abortifacient, but since that’s probably just about everything except diaphragms, condoms and tubal ligation, it’s sort of a distinction without a difference.

  29. 29
    Thomas says:

    Niels, you’re right, what I said was incorrect. I both conflated far-right Catholic positions with Protestant evangelical positions, and misstated the latter.

    As you say, most Protestants, including evangelicals, don’t have a problem with contraception within marriage. Many evangelicals, however, EC, access to contraception for teens (or even for all singles), and teaching about contraception (and as Barbara points out, all sex outside of marriage). So I view them as potential supporters for policies that substantially curtail access to contraception. If Griswold is not a bee in the bonnet of evangelical Protestants, then Baird v. Eisenstat, which extended Griswold to single people, surely is not on their happy list.

    As for Catholics, there’s plenty of dissenting, progressive Catholics. I married one. But the socially and politically conservative ones, the Santorums, oppose abortion, EC, and contraception. As Barbara points out, the limit on advocacy for legal bars leaves plenty of room for opposition. Oral contraception is certainly something a doctrinaire Catholic could seek to ban by law.

    I concede I misspoke — I was multitasking and simply wrote before I thought. But certainly, in states like Alabama and Texas, which have anti-dildo laws, the “religious” opposition to sex is strong enough to see a push for significant restrictions on contraception.

    Further, the various religious conservatives, freed from the constraints of the constitutional right to privacy, might want to outlaw sodomy, obscene speech, and sexual aids.