Savita Halappanavar, who died after being denied an abortion, became a symbol of Ireland’s drive to legalize the procedure in 2018. Credit…Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters
Dear Commons Community,
Maureen Dowd had a scathing column yesterday condemning the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. Entitled, “Supreme Contempt for Women,” she compares the recent case of Kate Cox to the death of an Irishwoman, Savita Halappanavar, who was expecting her first child and who became seriously ill. She went to a hospital, where she was crushed to learn that her fetal membranes were bulging and her 17-week-old fetus would not survive. Knowing her life was at stake, she begged the medical staff to remove the fetus. A midwife explained to her, “It’s a Catholic thing. We don’t do it here.” Savita developed septic shock and died four days after her baby girl, whom she named Prasa, was stillborn.
Here in the United States, Down goes to comment that:
“Religious fanatics on the Supreme Court have yanked America back to back alleys. American women are punished, branded with Scarlet Letters, forced to flee to get procedures.
And we have our own fraught case of a 31-year-old begging for a termination: Kate Cox, a married Texas mother of two who was thrilled to be pregnant until she was told that her fetus had a deadly chromosomal abnormality. Continuing the pregnancy could also keep Cox from getting pregnant again.
“I kept asking more questions, including how much time we might have with her if I continued the pregnancy,” Cox wrote in The Dallas Morning News. “The answer was maybe an hour — or at most, a week. Our baby would be in hospice care from the moment she is born if she were to be born alive.”
Cox, more than 20 weeks pregnant, had to leave Texas to have an abortion because the state’s boorish, mega-MAGA attorney general, Ken Paxton, gleefully threatened to prosecute “hospitals, doctors or anyone else” who helped her, even floating first-degree felony charges. The case has become so politically toxic that even the voluble Ted Cruz, who is running for re-election next year, has clammed up about it. The Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, playing school nurse, warned Republicans on the Hill to talk less about banning abortion and more about the benefits of contraception.
I’m sure even Donald Trump, who was once pro-choice but now panders to evangelicals, has qualms about criminalizing abortion. It’s a political loser and could cost him the election if women are supermobilized. He called Ron DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban in Florida “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.” Once Trump bragged about appointing the conservative justices on the court who were pivotal in overturning Roe v. Wade. But that won’t be a great sales pitch in the general election.
It is outrageous that such an important right in America was stripped away by a handful of cloistered, robed zealots, driven by religious doctrine, with no accountability.
But the Savonarola wing of the Supreme Court — all Catholics except Neil Gorsuch, who was raised Catholic and went to the same suburban Washington Catholic prep school as Brett Kavanaugh — could go to even more extreme lengths. The court announced Wednesday that it will consider curtailing the availability of a pill used to terminate first-trimester pregnancies. Soon, it’ll be mandating the rhythm method.
An explosive new Times article by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak revealed that Justice Samuel Alito was even more underhanded than we knew as he plotted to engineer “a titanic shift in the law” by vitiating Roe. Conservative judges who assured the Senate that Roe was settled law in their confirmation hearings could barely wait until Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died to throw it in the constitutional rights rubbish bin.
Dowd concludes: “The more we learn, the more infuriating it is that our lives and choices about our bodies are determined by conniving radicals. The Supreme Court is way, way out of order.”
Indeed!
Tony
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