Dear Friend and Reader:
WE ARE ABOUT to experience a total eclipse of the Moon in the sign Scorpio, symbols boldly pointing to matters of women’s reproduction, and concerns of the public about such issues.Soon after the corresponding solar eclipse in Taurus on April 30, a draft decision was leaked from the Supreme Court for the first time in American history, pertaining to the case Dobbs v. Jacobson’s Women’s Health Organization.
The proposed ruling would render it legal for states to entirely ban abortion, overturning the famous Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood cases.
This is also happening during the Chiron return of the Roe decision, and of the United States — and during the Pluto return of the United States. We live in revolutionary times. But the question is, whose revolution, and against what.
The supposed religious rights of a fictional entity (a corporation) were held by the court to be more important than the private medical choices and religious or ethical principles of individual women.
We’ve Been Witnessing This for Years
As the kind of man who hangs out with midwives, civil rights attorneys and internationally acclaimed feminists, I have known which way the wind was blowing for a long time. A journalism colleague of mine was involved with training women for safe, home-based, early-term abortion in 1990, preparing for this moment 31 years ago. (She is now a midwife.)
We have all watched as the Supreme Court has slowly but steadily eroded sexual freedoms and privileges, including the infamous Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, a 2014 decision that allows medical discrimination in the name of religious freedom.
Under this decision, family-held businesses can prevent women employees from obtaining birth control through their employee health insurance benefits, if the business determines that such violates its own “religious freedom.” The supposed religious rights of a fictional entity (a corporation) were held by the court to be more important than the private medical choices and religious or ethical principles of individual women.
The same people who are attempting to remove the right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term are also interfering with their right to prevent pregnancies. And so far as I have seen, the feminist movement is not responding; a few individuals have a clue. But there is no sense of collective response.
During the hearings, it never came out that he was one of the company’s top attorneys during the height of the company’s atrocities involving Agent Orange, the Vietnam-era herbicide that was at the time being used on civilians in the United States. While dioxin poisons everyone, it is especially toxic to the female reproductive system.
We’ve Come a Long Way Since The Second Sex
Since the old days of the late 1980s when I took Carol Smith’s 20th Century Women Poets graduate seminar at Rutgers University — an awakening experience for me — I have seen the feminist movement do everything but stand up in some meaningful way for women’s right to make their own choices. It has done everything but stand for equality, in society, in relationships and under the law.
The “feminist” agenda has included anti-porn censorship crusading (not prior, but post-restraint — confiscate the already printed books at the border). It regularly wages war against perceived “pickup artists” and “involuntarily celibate” men.
Its devotees have complained endlessly about “manspreading” (a way of sitting) and “mansplaining” (a perceived way of speaking), and have destroyed the careers of men for so little as making a joke in an elevator.
“The male gaze” is considered a form of terrorism (it is actually a theory of cinema).
They routinely attack other feminists including Margaret Atwood, and have declared war on so-called TERFs — classical feminists who object to the conflation of feminism with trans rights.
They chant “My Body, My Choice” at rallies, while allowing a generation of girls to be injected with Gardasil without their informed consent about the known effects.
In 1991, during the confirmation hearing for Assoc. Justice Clarence Thomas, the then-nominee was interrogated for his alleged “pubic hair in the Coke” comment, while being given a free pass for his role in defending and promoting Monsanto’s most heinous crimes against people and all living creatures.
During the hearings, it never came out that he was head of Monsanto’s Regulatory Affairs office, one of the company’s top attorneys during the height of the company’s atrocities involving Agent Orange, the Vietnam-era herbicide that was at the time being used on civilians in the United States. While dioxin poisons everyone, it is especially toxic to the female reproductive system.
And he presided over Regulatory Affairs for the company during the entire IBT Labs scandal unfolding — the total failure of safety regulation in all chemical products, where Monsanto was directly involved. But thanks to the alleged pubic hair in the Coke (a company that owed its success to Monsanto making cheap soft drink components), the public knows nothing about this. [Check out upcoming Planet Waves FM for details].
While supposedly liberal women went after the claimed misdeeds of Garrison Keillor and Sen. Al Franken, ending the careers of these and other political allies, their adversaries were working together tirelessly with lobbyists, organizing in church, raising money, and pushing laws through state legislatures.
Compared to those who terminated their pregnancies, those who continued pregnancy were more likely to experience perinatal death and serious pregnancy complications. They also were more likely to remain in relationships with intimate partner violence, a risk to themselves and their children.
Meanwhile, Conservatives Were Organizing
During the post-Roe era, conservative women and their many supporters successfully organized around one central purpose: ending anything that assured the legal personhood of women. They blocked adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and worked relentlessly to dismantle and demolish Roe v. Wade and the closely related Casey v. Planned Parenthood.
While supposedly liberal women went after the claimed misdeeds of Garrison Keillor and Sen. Al Franken, ending the careers of these and other political allies, their adversaries were working together tirelessly with lobbyists, organizing in church, raising money, packing the Supreme Court, and pushing laws through state legislatures.
And they were litigating with the single-minded determination to get anti-choice laws before the Supreme Court. This was all in hopes of fairly overturning Roe, a project endorsed by then Assoc. Justice Anthony Kennedy.
Now that day has arrived. Even if by some miracle the vote count or specifics of Dobbs change, the court still has the votes to effect its sweeping mandates. The conservative bloc on the court currently has a six-to-three majority and can enact any agenda it wants. This has taken persistence and patience over many decades. Many people incorrectly assumed that the court would never possibly overturn Roe and Casey, and stick to their own precedents.
But the court seems poised to do much worse. In my reading of the proposed Dobbs decision, it answers none of the questions raised by banning abortion, and opens the door to prosecuting them. This will also have the effect of killing some women, thereby depriving them of their due process rights — and their lives.
As was recently written in The Hill by Marta Perez, a board-certified OB-GYN:
“This dichotomy between the safety of pregnancy and abortion was shown in The Turnaway Study, a longitudinal study from researchers at the University of California San Francisco. They collected data from abortion facilities nationwide comparing outcomes for people who accessed abortion and those who could not.
“Compared to those who terminated their pregnancies, those who continued pregnancy were more likely to experience perinatal death and serious pregnancy complications. They also were more likely to remain in relationships with intimate partner violence, a risk to themselves and their children.”
Hypocrisy weakens any argument, particularly one made on spiritual or moral grounds. To my senses, “My Body, My Choice” has been abandoned, and treated with contempt, by the people who now need it the most.
Where is the Moral Standing of ‘My Body, My Choice’?
A few years ago, we all understood the meaning of “My Body, My Choice.” It meant that all women, and by extension all people, have the right to choose what happens to their body. This is the concept of pro-choice rather than pro-abortion.
In the past two years, we have seen the liberal movement line up behind a policy of “Her Body, My Choice.”
We have watched (or cheered) as nurses, doctors, teachers, firefighters, airline pilots, and people of many other professions were forced to get a “covid” injection — or be fired from jobs they may have done well for decades.
Anyone who supported their freedom of choice was supposedly in favor of the virus.
What surprised me was the lack of any recognition that the two issues are not just related, but one and the same. The right to choose is the right to choose.
The right to not be penetrated against one’s will, including by coercion (sometimes called “coerced consent”), has been a rallying cry of the “feminist” movement for years. So we may wonder why a sharp object containing a mystery liquid being forced into one’s body is more permissible, and more welcome, than a penis. At least we all know what a penis is.
Where is the moral standing of the claim, “My Body My Choice”? Hypocrisy weakens any argument, particularly one made on spiritual or moral grounds. To my senses, “My Body, My Choice” has been abandoned, and treated with contempt, by the people who previously espoused it as sacred, and who now need it the most.
If we are willing to tolerate and even cheer on forced, experimental injections, we open the door to many problems related to the state imposing its will on the body; and of people allowing this to happen. If we allow the courts to take away the right to choose pregnancy or not, what else can they take jurisdiction over? Is one’s own body one’s own property, or that of the government?
Any country that can ban abortion can make it mandatory; if it is not the woman’s choice, then it is not so under any circumstances.
Healing Fractured Trust Between Men and Women
When the #metoo movement emerged in the autumn of 2017, my first thought was: this is not going to be good for the already fragile trust between men and women. Specifically, I was concerned about the potential that, in the likely event that Roe was overturned, a woman could have a miscarriage, and then be falsely accused by a malicious partner of having had an abortion.
Anywhere that is considered homicide, women are going to need allies. Would someone lie and falsely accuse a woman? Well, it’s happened before.
Anti-choice activists are not going to stop with overturning Roe, should they succeed in doing so. It is probable that every pregnancy will become a potential crime scene. This has happened in El Salvador and as close to home as Utah.
Any country that can ban abortion can make it mandatory; if it is not the woman’s choice, then it is not so under any circumstances. And women are going to need men to advocate for them, and be both personal confidants and political allies as this moves forward. In today’s environment, this seems to be a stretch.
In 2017, I wrote an article called Summer of Trust: The Great American Eclipse. We need to revisit that event as the astrological root of the various disasters we are seeing unfold – all of which involve a divided society. This was about eight weeks before we first heard about the #metoo movement.
I hear talk of revolution and fostering change, without the meekest awareness that to do that, we have to get together and talk and listen to one another; to make any change at all, we need to be willing to work together — for no money, and no promise of success.
What the World Needs Now is Trust, Sweet Trust
In that article, an artifact of the summer of 2017, I wrote:
I‘m noticing anger, particularly from women. They don’t talk about it much; you can see it on their faces, which often look like they’re cast in stone. Attempting to start a conversation is widely seen as an affront. I notice many young men walking around the streets with a vacuous expression in their eyes. I see many people avoiding one another; I notice many people who seem terrified to go off-script even for a moment, or to embark on anything without a supposedly guaranteed outcome.
I walk into a busy café and half of the people are typing into computers or other devices. This is just an outer representation of what seems to be a society whose members are growing increasingly socially crippled, and unable to have a conversation without panicking or getting offended.
I hear, or hear of, many conversations that conflate attraction to another person with sexual objectification — or worse, with rape.
I hear talk of revolution and fostering change, without the meekest awareness that to do that, we have to get together and talk and listen to one another; to make any change at all, we need to be willing to work together — for no money, and no promise of success.
Underlying all of this is a profound lack of trust in one another, and in society, which must be rooted in people’s lack of trust in themselves, their perceptions and their assessments of people.
We need to do better than we are doing right now, though this will require a conscious effort at healing, reconciliation, and honoring the bodily and spiritual integrity and autonomy of everyone.
By which I mean, everyone.
Faithfully,
Roe v. Wade and the Demon Haunted World: Religious Opposition to the Prerogatives and Choices of Women | from Planet Waves FM
Comment by Larry Allen in Australia, via email:
Hi Eric,
Its interesting, and affirmative of the many thought streams that you maintain on the subjects. As usual with my personal pluto mars issues, I tend to notice what is missing. Which I won’t belabour you with here except to say that perhaps the next one can be “A Warning to Men and the Women Who Love Them”. I say this because what’s missing in all of these conversations is any stream of thought about the love women have for men, and if women are the source of all ‘everything’, perhaps its high time we got that aspect back out into the open, in A PROPER WAY.
Feminism is the second most destructive thing that’s ever happened to the ‘State of Women’. It has completely rationalised what a woman is, and by extension, completely derogated men and both are now objectified and completely turned to data. Which was a good thing in terms of stirring up a mess of hate for profitable purposes, but really, its done NOTHING for women and made life impossible for women who love men. The current narrative is that a bunch of ‘Brave’ women at war against the Patriarchy has obtained all these rights for women etc etc, but the reality is that the ‘White Knight’ aspects of the so-called ‘Patriarchy (Yes, even the dreaded Patriarchy has a good side) opened the doors for the rise of women, and the technological developments of the 20th and 21st centuries made it all achievable. Women aren’t equal, they are elevated, compared to men; in our societies and they always have been.
But you never hear of this, you only hear of complaint and I am becoming very dubious about the flood of such material that is going through our societies. If a woman retains a right to choose, so must a man, if she retains a right to change her mind, so must a man have the same right, but you will never hear a social activist say such things, and you will never hear of a ‘Powerful Woman’ proclaiming the necessity of such things. A woman’s reproductive right INCLUDES the right to be loved and impregnated by a man, why is that never discussed? I could go on but you see the point and the bottom line question is: “What is behind all of this?” When we ask such questions, the answer is often in the money trail and in this situation I fear that the money trail has something to do with IVF. All these factors which are set towards turning women away from men, are also turning women towards IVF and the reason for this is not care for women, its money. It is also a brilliant plan because one of the top 5 female fantasy figures is ‘Surgeon’, so the whole shebang has the delusional power of fantasy realisation to it. Worryingly, certain ‘Spiritual Types’ are even favouring such approaches because IVF babies are ‘pure’ and free from Karma. Think about that for a second…. ‘Pure and Free from Karma’. The word Robot comes to mind… GMO Foodcrops, Save the Planet by ‘Beyond Meat’… its all the same process.
So much for the second most destructive thing that’s happened to ‘Women’. What is the first? I propose that it is the loss of female mystery, due to science and medicine. Think about a time before science discovered the human egg (or any mammalian egg for that matter). How did women do what they did? You can’t see it in the way that you can see a man’s ejaculation, yet somehow, babies grew inside women and that’s the original source of the attractive and illusory, and much vaunted, mystery of women.
Science removed that veil of mystery and ‘Womanhood’ seems to have been angry about the uncloaking ever since. IVF and further derogation of men and a woman’s right to choose a man, for a night or forever, are not going to fix any of this. The argument needs to go the other way… Mystery needs to be elevated again, including the mystery of men.
C’est Voila!
Larry
bravo! Larry…
i feel so heartened to read what you have shared, and i resonate and agree with every word you have written.
BY STEVE BERGESTEIN, CONSTITUTIONAL ATTORNEY, uncredited contributor to my recent Roe articles — via Facebook…
I have refrained from debating people on FB about politics ever since the January 6 incident, but I have been discussing the draft Alito opinion on abortion that came out last week. Here is what I have been saying:
Constitutional interpretation is complex. There is no official way to interpret that document. The Bill of Rights identifies certain rights and entitlements in absolute terms (“Congress shall make no law …”) but the Supreme Court does not interpret them literally or without exceptions. In other words, we intepret constitutional provisions much differently than we would a statute, where the language is carefully analyzed. So the first objection people have to Roe v. Wade, that abortion appears nowhere in the Constitution, makes no sense to many constitutional lawyers and scholars.
Roe v. Wade drew from the right to privacy, but there is no privacy amendment but a privacy precedent from 1965 (Griswold v. Connecticut) that struck down laws prohibiting the use of contraception. That decision was the precursor to Roe v. Wade but was among a line of rulings from the Court that protects family planning, etc. To me, the right to abortion falls within that line of cases, which also includes sexual privacy, the right to marry, and the right to raise your family any way you want.
Alito’s draft opinion says abortion is different from these other family-planning doctrines because it involves the termination of fetal life. But that is a judgment call on his part, and that of the other four justices who may sign onto Alito’s analysis. It is easy to imagine an alternate universe where the Court also brings the right to abortion within the sex discrimination umbrella, as many scholars (including RBG) have suggested, as abortion laws primarily affect women.
There are many constitutional rights that aren’t specifically found in the constitution, including “one-man one-vote,” the right to travel, freedom of association, the right to vote, and the right to marry. In addition, in 1992, the Supreme Court said abortion also falls within the liberty interest set forth in the Due Process Clause. The definition of “liberty” is also a judgment call. Your liberty is not my liberty. I would say the right to control your body, particularly involving reproductive choices that can affect the rest of your life, is a liberty interest under the Due Process Clause.
The malleability of modern constitutional analysis means that if a constitutional case yields majority and dissenting opinions, as this case will, then intelligent judges can come out either way on that issue, and they can do so in a manner that qualifies as constitutional reasoning. What leads a judge to pick one side over the other turns on their constitutional philosophy and, honestly, personal preference as well.
Ultimately, we choose how the constitution is interpreted. The candidates we vote for signal what they want in a Supreme Court justice. When Trump ran for president in 2016, he said he’d appoint anti-Roe justices, and all the anti-abortion justices these days were appointed by Republican presidents.
Pro-choicers who voted for Trump knew what they were getting into, but they did so anyway, not thinking that something this drastic might happen. Or they forgot that the president appoints Supreme Court justices. Or they took Roe for granted and simply didn’t like Hillary or her emails or Bill or any other sideshow that now seems trivial now that women in over a dozen states will be stranded without the right to abortion in case they really need one, and many do.