Erasing "Roe" - A Jane Crow and Hand Maid's Tale
by W. Bernell Brooks lll on 05/04/22
Today, the New Black Nationalist Network condemned the May 2, 2022, draft opinion of the Supreme Court on Dobbs Vs. Mississippi Department of Health that held "Roe [v. Wade] was incorrectly decided," and egregiously wrong from the start. " If upheld, the majority opinion will effectively eliminate abortion protections for women by handing authority over abortion access to the states.
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Samuel Alito's opinion is an unbridled attack on women's independence and autonomy by denying their right to make life-sustaining decisions that are uniquely and singularly determined by childbearing.
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Striking down abortion rights will absolutely increase the mortality rate of Black women and teenage girls whose abortion rate of 25.1%, is already 3.8 times higher than white women (6.6%). Black women and teenagers' mortality rate is currently three times higher than their white counterparts [per 1,000 women ages 15-44, according to the CDC].
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Sending authority to decide abortion access to the states will increase black women's mortality rate and serious medical illnesses by pricing them out of access. For example, the average travel distance for 1.1 million women in Louisiana for legal abortion services is currently 33 miles one-way. Overturning Roe will increase one-way travel to 670 miles. It is a certainty that Black women will increasingly engage in back-alley procedures and home remedies to self-abort. Almost 70% of U.S. abortion recipients lived below the federal poverty level in 2018.
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Worse still, given the number of Black women and teenage abortion recipients, Alito's opinion criminalizes Black women in 13 states, effective immediately upon its adoption. In Michigan, Alito's opinion would re-instate its 1931 law that makes abortion a felony with no exceptions for rape or incest. In 2018, 55.8% of Michigan's abortions were performed on Black women.
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In Texas, women who are more than six weeks pregnant are not only criminalized but are subject to surveillance and targeting with a $10,000 reward on their heads by bounty hunters. One has to wonder what comes next: police roadblocks, porta-johns and rapid pregnancy test set up at state lines?
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But there is more. Once a woman becomes pregnant and seeks an abortion under Alito's decree in a Hand Maid's State, by default she and her unborn child become property and wards of the state. Raped teens will be forced to give birth to children.
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?Those who believe the Democrat congress and Biden can pass federal legislation to codify abortion rights are being gaslit. Democrats in Congress are impotent knaves who will do nothing. Should Republicans take control of both houses in November 2022, their first order of business will be passing a national abortion ban.
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Because Alito's opinion asserts "The Constitution makes no mention of abortion," therefore it is not grounded in constitutional jurisprudence, alarm bells are being sounded that birth control, gay marriage and even interracial marriage are on the chopping block. All that's true.
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But New Black Nationalists want to be clear: Alito's opinion is a white heteropatriarchal sledgehammer to bash women into submission, particularly the majority of Black women who live in Southern Hand Maid's states.
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It was thought that when Amy Coney-Barrett was nominated to the Supreme Court, one of her tasks would be to write the majority opinion when the 6-3 conservative bench appointed the hour to overturn Roe. It didn't happen.
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It wasn't the brooding Defacto Chief Justice Clarence Thomas, or Coney Barrett, the cerebral intellectual and mother of five children who would wordsmith a softer and nuanced argument reversing Roe. No. Alito was the angry white man on the campaign stump, using blunt acerbic language that was punishing and designed to invoke terror. It was crafted in an Old Testament vernacular that any "four-square" southern preacher could roll with on Sunday service while his assistant pastor handled snakes and "cut a rug" at the same time.
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This should not be surprising as Alito was writing to an American public in which 60% support maintaining Roe. Alito was speaking on behalf of a White Nationalist Republican Party, and a reactionary white evangelical religious viewpoint.
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White evangelicals comprising 14% of America's population are the only religious group in the country whose majority supports a total abortion ban. Their world view is also the slavish submission of women to their God-anointed male masters.
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We are thus reminded of Supreme Court Justice Sonja Sotomayer's December 10, 2021, warning about the Supreme Court's decision to delay taking action on Texas Senate Bill 8 restriction of abortion rights.
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Sotomayor averred that "S. B. 8’s existing manipulation of state court procedures and defenses echoes the philosophy of John C. Calhoun, a virulent defender of the slaveholding South who insisted that States had the right to “veto” or “nullify” any federal law with which they disagreed."
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Sotomayor's reference to "states' rights" and the slaveholding South conjures visions of a time-machine--a portal to transport women back to an era of Jane Crow, Hand Maid's States or even Fatimah Mernissi's "Time of Troubles." When the Caliphate was in crisis, women were locked in their homes.
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But Alito, the Republican Party, "Lost Cause" White Nationalists, and white evangelicals will surely reap the whirlwind of what they've sown, sooner rather than later. They have unleashed a force that is destined to overwhelm them.
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New Black Nationalist support women's right to choose, and to exercise sovereignty and agency over their bodies and lifestyles.
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We support the full liberation of women and look forward to American Empire's collapse and establishing a majority Black-led republic that eradicates the heteropatriarchal order.
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