Column: Defense of women's rights is defense of our individual liberties
In 1973, seven of nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, which favored individual liberty to control one’s own body. Most were conservative Republicans. They were real conservatives, followers of Edmund Burke, the philosophical father of conservatism, who believed that individual liberty was the goal of conservatism, with privacy its first product. This is far different from today’s self-styled conservatives, who are promoters of privilege and who deny any right to privacy or other traditional rights of the people guaranteed under the Tenth Amendment. They do guarantee an unrestricted right of gun ownership, by ignoring that the Second Amendment protected members of state militias from federal prosecution for insurrection for keeping or bearing arms, rather than giving blanket permission to have guns.
The end of WWII led the western world, including the United States, to reduce discrimination and oppression in favor of liberty, privacy and equality. In the U.S., segregation fell in the military, schools and society. Women gained access to education and employment they had been denied. Inter-racial marriage was accepted, contraception was allowed, society became more open and equal. At a time when an Equal Rights Amendment almost achieved approval by enough states to become part of the Constitution, it was time for the oppression of women controlling their own bodies to end.
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Although canon law and civil law agree that human life begins on the first breath after birth (inspiration), church and state had been prohibiting women from controlling their fertility since about 1870. Their jurisdiction was lacking. A privacy interest under liberty exists, but no state or church interest before birth was established up at least until independent viability, when a moratorium on termination seemed reasonable.
Roe and Casey, to which Justice Alito refers in his brief, were cases of individual liberty despite opponents claiming that women could not make their own decisions. The court took the very conservative view in Roe that the state had no compelling need to intervene in a personal decision and, in Casey, that the abusive husband of a woman kept barefoot and pregnant to keep her under control was the last person she would want to know she was pregnant and about to get an abortion.
Progress in individual liberties has continued, such as with marriage equality. However, there has been a rising tide of demands to go back to the old ways. It is a convenient political tool to rile up people concerned about what they have been told is a loss of their control. Promoters of privilege promise to return the good old days that never were, in return for power.
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We are waiting for an avalanche of reversals of individual liberties going back to Roe, then to contraceptives, then maybe to interracial marriage, then who knows where. This is not a moral crusade, but a strategic political move to break and dispirit people who have relied on expanding civil liberties and human rights for generations.
We have ways to defend our society. Contact your senators and representative and tell them it is time to pass a women’s health protection act that codifies Roe v. Wade, even if it is necessary to abandon the filibuster in the Senate to do so.
If Obama can win Indiana in 2008, it seems impossible for the Republicans to have earned 83% of legislative seats so soon after. Tell the Indiana Legislature the extreme gerrymandering in Indiana is unacceptable and we want a non-partisan redistricting commission.
Above all, vote as though your life – and everyone else’s – depends on it.
John Daschke, Ph.D., is a resident of Bloomington.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Columnist writes civil liberties must be protected against erosion
