There are currently nine states where a rape victim under the age of 18 is forced to carry a fetus to term. Four states where that’s true even if there is a threat to the girl’s or woman’s health. This is the reality of America since the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs v. Women’s Health Organization ruling on June 24, 2022. Within days of the Dobbs ruling, a 10-year-old rape victim was forced to flee Ohio to find treatment. The child was almost six and half weeks pregnant, just past the cutoff for Ohio’s “fetal heartbeat” ban.
As grim as all of this has been, still is, and will be in the future, Republicans want to make things worse. That doesn’t mean just a national abortion ban that spreads these horrors to every state. It means forcing women to surrender their autonomy and be crushed by a patriarchy that demands control over every aspect of their bodies.
On Wednesday, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are “children,” showing yet another aspect of how radical conservatives are forcing their way into the most intimate decisions of women and families. And that’s just the beginning.
In vitro fertilization has been available as an option in the United States since 1981. For many individuals and families, IVF represents the only viable means of attaining pregnancy. It is often expensive and difficult, with a success rate of less than 50%. It may take several tries before establishing a successful pregnancy.
In the wake of the ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court—whose chief justice espouses a Christian nationalist belief that Christians must impose fundamentalist values on every aspect of American society and law—many would-be parents in Alabama have lost access to IVF. What happens now to the "extrauterine children" stored frozen in Alabama clinics remains unclear. What is clear is that, under a ruling that turns every fertilized egg into a “child,” thousands of individuals and couples seeking to start a family will go childless.
Far from running from this decision, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley endorsed the Alabama court’s position on Wednesday. And though she has since tried to walk that statement back—slightly—it’s clear that Republican politicians are closely aligned with the groups supporting these decisions.
That the Dobbs ruling could lead to an end of IVF might seem like a stretch, but the threat was not unexpected. The process of IVF is impossible to square with extremist abortion laws that insist life begins at conception. IVF is currently responsible for 84,000 babies a year, and it’s the preferred way for many LGBTQ+ couples to have a child—which is absolutely a reason why conservatives are more than willing to see this process stopped.
But that’s not the end of where Republicans want to take the nation after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion. It’s not even close to the end.
Right now, the Supreme Court is deciding the fate of the widely used abortion drug mifepristone. The drug was approved in 2000, and the Food and Drug Administration affirms its safety based on over 20 years of studies. But those trying to block access to mifepristone are claiming that the FDA didn’t use a lawful review process, and conservative judges have repeated this claim, despite a lack of evidence.
That’s far from the end. From the moment the Supreme Court returned control over women’s lives to the men running state governments, the right moved directly into a war on birth control. Conservative Christian group Alliance Defending Freedom—the same group that was behind the case of the Colorado cake shop that won the right to discriminate against gay couples—wants to convince Americans that the “birth control pill was a mistake, ”in the words of a longtime leader of the group.
Such groups have launched a propaganda campaign insisting that the birth control pill is far more dangerous than any study or decades of experience demonstrate. That propaganda is now being spread by Elon Musk.
But banning the pill isn’t the end goal. It’s merely a step along the path. The Heritage Foundation, which loves to brag about how it was instrumental in selecting the conservative judges that now pack the Supreme Court, is absolutely open about where it wants to go.
They released a video that would be shocking if it had been taken from some secret meeting of the group and smuggled to public visibility. But the Heritage Foundation posted this video to their own X (formerly Twitter) account. This is their public position. This is what they want you to see.
After a series of false claims about the dangers of birth control pills, the speaker gets down to business by insisting that birth control pills were invented for “the purpose of rendering a woman receptive to what is, for the most part, loveless and sometimes extremely degrading sexual access.” Then she moves on to the core of her argument.
“It seems to me that a good place to start would be a feminist movement against the pill, and for rewilding sex, returning the danger to sex, returning the intimacy and, really, the consequentiality to sex.”
If that sounds at all confusing, what she’s saying is that women shouldn’t be able to have sex without being concerned about becoming pregnant. That’s the “rewilding,” the “danger,” and the “consequentiality” she wants.
The goal of the Heritage Foundation, the Republican politicians it empowers, and the judges it selects is to end the option of sex for any purpose other than reproduction. They’re not hiding this. They are proud of it. And if that means women surrender every ounce of agency in their lives … well, that’s the goal, after all.
The Supreme Court is about to rule on a drug that has been helping women since 2000.
Republicans are taking away an option used by would-be parents since 1981.
They’ve taken away rights that existed since 1973.
Now they want to roll things back to before 1960.
Even that’s not the true end. Because the end is somewhere back in the Bronze Age and in fantasies of what it means for women to “submit” to the control of men.
It’s been less than two years since the Dobbs decision, but America is a fundamentally different nation than it was in the 50 years leading up to June 24, 2022. Where we go from here will be decided in November. By women, and by everyone who genuinely respects them.
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