Two Years Ago, the GOP Supreme Court Declared War on Women

By Jacob Weindling | June 24, 2024 | 11:00am

Photo by Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images

Supreme Court Roe v Wade

Two Years Ago, the GOP Supreme Court Declared War on Women

Today marks the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which reversed half a century of progress in overruling the landmark Roe v. Wade case which established that women have a constitutional right to an abortion. We are back to living in a pre-1973 world now, as America’s right-wing attempts to take more and more rights away from women.

While a group of people who generally support bombing foreign countries and people’s right to own an arsenal of guns claim this is about being pro-life, being anti-abortion is anything but. As Human Rights Watch explains: “Abortion bans violate the rights to be free from violence, to privacy, to family, to health, and even the right to life. And bans are most devastating for people of color, young people, and marginalized communities, who already have trouble accessing health care and other needed services.”

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Make no mistake, this misogynistic cultural movement is about controlling women. They do not care about protecting life as evidenced by their pro-violence positions on a range of other political subjects and their enthusiastic support for a presidential candidate who openly fantasizes about violence all the time. The fetus is simply just a vehicle for these types to pretend they care about the life of the child, but we all know that the moment a fetus becomes a person, all Republicans want to do is take resources away from it to give to their rich donors.

A study from 2014 to 2020 found that “enforcement of each additional Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) law was associated with a 3.4 percent increase in the rate of intimate partner violence–related homicide in this population. We estimated that 24.3 intimate partner violence–related homicides of women and girls ages 10–44 were associated with TRAP laws implemented in the states and years included in this analysis.”

Domestic violence experts echoed the findings in this study in the wake of Roe’s repeal, worrying that it would lead to a spike in domestic violence against women.

Abortion clinics have seen a rise in violence against them too, as this violent revanchist movement has made clear what they mean when they say they value life: as a branding exercise. Abortion is just the trojan horse this movement uses to try to establish a Republican evangelical Christian theocracy in Washington D.C., and if they truly were pro-life, the life of the mother would at least enter their calculations.

Instead, their support to overturn Roe has put the lives of millions of women at risk, and Republicans around the country have taken their cue from our extremist Supreme Court to further impose their depraved beliefs on the lives of women.

Alabama’s Supreme Court famously outlawed in vitro fertilization (IVF), and a state law was passed to try to mitigate the evil coming from that decision, but there are still clinics saying they will stop IVF services by the end of the year because of the Court’s ruling. This is perhaps the best example since Dobbs proving that this has nothing to do with anything the pro-life movement claims it to be about, and it is simply just about allowing the state and Republican men to exert as much control over women’s lives as possible.

Over 20 Republican-led states passed restrictions on abortion after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, as this assault on the sovereignty of American women was clearly coordinated across the entire Republican Party. They had a vision for how they would take freedom away from women and they executed it over the course of a half-century. Justice Samuel Alito famously wrote in Dobbs that this issue should be taken from the courts and returned “to the people’s elected representatives,” and litigation in the wake of the decision has exploded. Thanks to Alito and his reactionary compatriots’ ruling, the courts are more involved, not less, in this subject than they were before.

Mifepristone is an abortion pill that many advocates were concerned would come under fire from this Supreme Court next, but they delayed a ruling on the case brought by a group of conservative doctors. However, as Susan Rinkunas wrote for Jezebel, this was a procedural decision and they did not “rule on the merits of the underlying case, they just said these particular plaintiffs can’t sue. And there are other plaintiffs suing over mifepristone, and conservatives want the federal government to enforce a 19th-century anti-vice law to restrict the use of the drug.”

Everything these people say about their intentions in respect to abortion is a lie proven by their own actions and the consequences that spring from them. It’s all just about controlling women.

This seismic ruling by the Court to award itself sovereignty over every American woman’s body two years ago has had massive political consequences too. Democrats, famously a party who can never quite figure out its messaging strategy, has had their political path drawn out for them, as branding yourself as a protector of abortion rights has led candidates to receive a lot of money. In the 2023-24 election cycle alone, pro-abortion interests have given $3.37 million to federal candidates versus just $273,000 donated from anti-abortion groups.

However, abortion funds are now raising the alarm that they are running out of money. While it’s important to support politicians who will fight back against this barbaric movement, that kind of change only happens on the scale of election cycles. Pregnancies present far more urgency, and the dwindling of abortion providers’ coffers proves the effectiveness of this Republican assault of women. Donations for abortion funds initially spiked in the wake of the Dobbs decision, but they have dwindled ever since.

Oriaku Njoku, executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, said on a call that “I’m afraid that there is this level of complacency that has happened post-Dobbs. This is not the same movement that it was five years ago, let alone 50 years ago, and yet we’re still operating and funding as if it were the same issue as it was before.”

If you find yourself willing to donate to a politician, give that money to an abortion fund instead. They are on the front lines of this Republican-driven crisis that is continuing to deteriorate, and the apathy displayed by donors is alarming. Two years since their formal declaration of war, Republicans are accelerating their attacks on women, and it’s on the rest of civilized society to fight back.