A law professor at UC Irvine contradicts Alito:

Black women’s sexual subordination and forced pregnancies were foundational to slavery. If cotton was euphemistically king, Black women’s wealth-maximizing forced reproduction was queen.

Because those forced pregnancies were worth a lot of money – money for the enslaver, of course, not for the slave.

Ending the forced sexual and reproductive servitude of Black girls and women was a critical part of the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments. The overturning of Roe v. Wade reveals the Supreme Court’s neglectful reading of the amendments that abolished slavery and guaranteed all people equal protection under the law. It means the erasure of Black women from the Constitution.

Mandated, forced or compulsory pregnancy contravene enumerated rights in the Constitution, namely the 13th Amendment’s prohibition against involuntary servitude and protection of bodily autonomy, as well as the 14th Amendment’s defense of privacy and freedom.

Women don’t have bodily autonomy if they can’t cancel unwanted pregnancies. They have even less bodily autonomy than slaves and prisoner and draftees: they are the only humans forced to have another whole entire human being inside them for three quarters of a year. (If you want that resident human it can be a meaningful experience despite the discomforts, but if you don’t want it it’s a whole other story.)

This Supreme Court demonstrates a selective and opportunistic interpretation of the Constitution and legal history, which ignores the intent of the 13th and 14th Amendments, especially as related to Black women’s bodily autonomy, liberty and privacy which extended beyond freeing them from labor in cotton fields to shielding them from rape and forced reproduction. The horrors inflicted on Black women during slavery, especially sexual violations and forced pregnancies, have been all but wiped from cultural and legal memory. Ultimately, this failure disserves all women.

Even Karens. I’ve seen sadistic men rejoicing at the victory over “Karens” on social media since the ruling came down – white men, of course.

To understand the gravity of what is at stake, one need only turn to the Supreme Court’s own recent history. In 2016, Justice Stephen Breyer noted in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, women are 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion. The United States bears the chilling distinction of being the most dangerous place in the industrialized world to give birth, ranking 55th overall in the world.

Pause to let that sink in. 55th!!! We’re one of the very richest yet that’s where we are.

[S]lavery’s vestiges persisted in Southern states, including within the domains of privacy, child rearing and marriage. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, better known as the “Freedmen’s Bureau,” founded March 1865, collected letters written by Black mothers despairing over vile “apprenticeships” whereby their children were kidnapped and returned to bondage under the guise of traineeships.

Congress followed in 1868 with the ratification of the 14th Amendment, which further secured the interests of Black women who had been subjected to cruelties inflicted on them physically, reproductively, and psychologically.

The 14th Amendment opens with the sentence, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States … are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” and as such would be protected by the laws of the United States. Such language applied to infants born to Black women, changing the provisions of law that had long denied Black children citizenship and the protection of laws. Lawmakers were understandably concerned about overturning states laws that had denied children the dignity of personhood.

Reconstruction-era lawmakers that is. There was a ferocious Reaction all too soon. We’re still living in it.

Justice Samuel Alito’s claim, that there is no enumeration and original meaning in the Constitution related to involuntary sexual subordination and reproduction, misreads and misunderstands American slavery, the social conditions of that enterprise and legal history. It misinterprets how slavery was abolished, ignores the deliberation and debates within Congress, and craftily renders Black women and their bondage invisible.

It seems like an incredibly large thing to leave out, but people have been leaving it out all this time.