Clarence Thomas tells us he will not be bullied.

Following protests sparked by the leak of a draft U.S. Supreme Court decision indicating the justices are poised to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, Justice Clarence Thomas said on Friday that the court cannot be “bullied.”

We know. That’s the nature of the Court: once they’re there, we’re stuck with them (barring impeachment, which is vanishingly rare).

Thomas, one of the most conservative justices on the nine-member court, made only a few passing references to the protests over the leaked draft opinion as he spoke at a judicial conference in Atlanta.

As a society, “we are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like,” Thomas said.

Oh yes, unlike all those other societies that don’t want particular outcomes. Which societies would those be exactly? Is there a list?

“We can’t be an institution that can be bullied into giving you just the outcomes you want. The events from earlier this week are a symptom of that.”

Therefore the Dred Scott ruling was okie doke, yes?

Kathryn Joyce wrote about Amy Coney Barrett and abortion and the “supply” of babies the day after the leaked ruling:

If you want to understand what using adoption as the solution to unplanned pregnancies looks like, you don’t need to look far. But you do need to look. There’s a long and ugly history in the U.S. of coercive and even forced adoption. From roughly 1945 to 1972 — the year before the Supreme Court’s original Roe v. Wade decision — somewhere between 1.5 million and 6 million women relinquished infants for adoption, often after being “sent away” to homes for unwed mothers, where many women faced brutal coercion, were prohibited from contact with outsiders, went through labor and gave birth in segregated sections of hospitals, and were urged to relinquish their newborns while recovering from anesthesia.

What’s not to like?

After Roe v. Wade, the number of children relinquished for adoption began to drop precipitously. In 1972, close to 20 percent of unmarried pregnant white women relinquished their babies for adoption, but by the late 1990s, the rate had dropped to around 1 percent. (Infant relinquishment rates among never-married Black women have been statistically zero for decades.) 

For some people, that steep decline in the number of American children available for adoption was a problem. The stats Alito cited in his opinion — contrasting an overly abundant “demand” for adoptable children with a “virtually nonexistent” “supply” — reveals a little-recognized truth. First, adoption is an industry driven by supply and demand, as unpalatable as those terms may sound when we’re talking about human children. Second, the reflexive liberal retort to anti-abortion rhetoric — well, those right-wingers had better be ready to adopt all those extra babies! — badly misunderstands how this particular industry works. 

Third, these people are fucked in the head. A big “supply” of babies for other people to raise should not be a goal! Women are not work benches where babies are cranked out, and babies are not objects to be cranked out!

[I]n the mid-2000s, some anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers began trying to deploy market research to determine what “subconscious emotional motivators” might make adoption more appealing [to the baby-havers]. Two reports that emerged from that research — one bluntly titled “Birthmother, Good Mother: Her Story of Heroic Redemption” — counseled CPCs to use a common message: that single women who opted to parent their children were being selfish and immature, while choosing adoption was more mature and loving and even, in some cases, a chance for a woman to “prove her character by relinquishing her child.” 

That sort of rhetoric had real effects. One mother I met was sent to a modern maternity home in Washington state when she got pregnant at 19. There she was told that choosing adoption would both please God and prove that she loved her child more than if she kept him. Isolated from her friends, family and boyfriend, she was instead encouraged to spend time with the couple who wanted to adopt her child. She came to feel like a surrogate rather than a “real” mother, and when she expressed doubts about going through with the plan, she was chastised severely. When she fell into a deep depression after relinquishing her child, the family closed what was originally intended to be an open adoption, and she wasn’t allowed to see her son again.

That’s nice.

There are a lot of stories like this, but they’re often rendered invisible in a culture where adoption is seen as a unilateral good or a “win-win-win”; where Democrats have long sought to triangulate the abortion morass by offering, somehow, to “make adoption more available“; and where media depictions of birthmothers are often limited to seedy reality-show storylines. In a dynamic where adoptive parents are almost universally wealthier and more powerful than birthparents, even the language we use privileges one side of the story, leaving almost no neutral way to discuss the issue. 

In short the birthmothers are sluts and the baby belongs to those much better richer more powerful people in the SUV.

“The underlying consideration of adoption in the leaked opinion reflects the view that the decline of American infants available for adoption is inherently an adverse trend,” says sociologist Gretchen Sisson, author of the forthcoming book “Relinquished: The American Mothers Behind Infant Adoption.”

Which is sick. What are infants available for adoption? Infants without parents of their own, that’s what – because of death or emergency or some other bad, tragic obstacle. They’re not desirable consumer items! That is, they shouldn’t be, but it turns out they are.

Guy with an ugly habit of calling women names in public.

This has taken my breath away. (You know how that goes, right? That one that’s so stunning you stare at it for long seconds, forgetting to breathe?)

The shops are running low on tomato sauce, so let’s offer farmers incentives for growing more tomatoes.

The adoption system is running low on babies, so we will now force women to produce them.

If Amy Coney Barrett really said that, it’s absolutely stunning.

Wearing a bag over the head is now mandatory in Afghanistan.

For women that is. Not for men, of course. Men get to see and breathe and talk like normal human beings. Women have to wear bags over their heads because they are whores.

Afghan women will have to wear the Islamic face veil for the first time in decades under a decree passed by the country’s ruling Taliban militants.

The country’s woman-hating theocrats who seized power by force. And the thing is not a face veil, it’s a literal bag over the head, with a thick mesh to peer through in hopes of seeing the car in time to avoid being run over.

The decree was passed by the Taliban’s Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue.

They could always imprison men’s genitals instead, but no, men’s “vice” is always women’s fault. Allah hates women.

The Quran, Islam’s holy book, tells Muslims – men and women – to dress modestly. Male modesty has been interpreted to be covering the area from the navel to the knee. For women it is generally seen as covering everything except their face, hands and feet when in the presence of men they are not related or married to.

In other words men remain free while women are hobbled. “Islam’s holy book” hates women.

Not our crimes.

A transgender woman was sentenced Friday to 25 years in prison for forcing the 7-year-old daughter she fathered to participate in child pornography.

The 7-year-old daughter HE fathered. It’s a man’s crime.

Marina Volz, 32, of Franklin, was sentenced, along with three others, by Superior Court Judge Peter Tober for their roles in running a child pornography production company in their Coburn Lane home in Franklin Township.

…

Assistant Somerset County Prosecutor Brian Stack told the judge that the quartet was a “vortex of darkness” that “snuffed out” the girl who was taken from her mother in Oregon to New Jersey to be in the child pornography.

Imagine that poor child’s life there.

While not delving into the details of the crime, Tober said it involved neck collars, a cage in the basement, sex toys and other devices.

A horror movie, in other words. Silence of the Lambs but worse.

Volz, Romero and Allen operated what they described as a “family-owned transgender pornography production studio specializing in amateur, BDSM and taboo fetish content” from the residence.

Romero and Allen jointly sexually assaulted the child and filmed the assault, the video of which was recovered from multiple electronic items within the home.

But it was transgender pornography, so maybe it should be considered inclusive rather than criminal and sadistic?

I grew up just inside the Somerset County line. No transgender porn around. I was lucky.

I’ll be darned, the ACLU has a women’s rights project. I suppose it’s fully “inclusive.”

Its director is Ria Tabacco Mar, who writes in the Washington Post today about Alito’s cheery view of pregnancy:

Among the many shocking elements of the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, this one jumped out at me: the rosy picture of pregnancy painted by Justice Samuel Alito, who has never been pregnant.

Some wags on Twitter are asking how she can know that. Never mind; she corrects her error soon enough.

But anyone who has been pregnant — or cares to understand — knows that the reality in the United States is not rosy at all. At best, pregnant Americans must navigate a patchwork of leaky protections, a labyrinth of financial costs and penalties, and a health-care landscape that threatens the lives of the most vulnerable.

Ah yes, pregnant Americans. Pregnant citizens, pregnant individuals, pregnant persons – there’s a nice little bouquet of ways to avoid saying “women.” The ACLU probably has a handy list of them for staff. Mar does also use the w-word though – maybe she’s a rebel. Maybe she and Chase Strangio look daggers at each other in the corridors.

…there remains a persistent gap between the letter of the law and the lived experience of pregnant workers. That’s certainly been our experience at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, where we routinely represent women fired or forced into unpaid leave for being pregnant. These women aren’t anomalies. In the nearly half-century since 1978, pregnant workers have been continually denied reasonable accommodations they need to keep working safely or are outright fired for being pregnant, leading to more than 50,000 charges of pregnancy discrimination in the last decade alone.

In this context it’s reasonable and indeed necessary to say “workers” along with “women” since the subject is employment law.

These trends persist even though women now make up a majority of the workforce, and 85 percent of female workers will become pregnant at some point, with most continuing to work through their pregnancies — and beyond.

If only all of the ACLU could write this clearly.

The United States has the dubious distinction of having the worst maternal mortality rate among wealthy countries. And appalling racial disparities in resources and health care make pregnancy more life-threatening for some than for others. In Mississippi — the state whose abortion ban is currently before the Supreme Court in a case that the Alito draft addresses — the maternal mortality rate for Black women is nearly three times higher than that for White women. And in Washington, where the Supreme Court sits, Black people make up just 45 percent of the population but 90 percent of pregnancy-related deaths.

This is very important information, that everyone should be aware of. That’s why it’s crucial to state it clearly – to say both “women” and “Black.”

But in the very next paragraph…

Despite the fact that he has two children of his own, Alito displays astonishing ignorance about what many pregnant people and their families face in the wealthiest nation in the world…

At least women are there in the final paragraph.

I, for one, would love to live in the country that the draft opinion describes, where pregnancy is physically and economically safe, valued and supported. Unfortunately, we live in this one — where even a wanted pregnancy and birth can be among the most economically disruptive experiences most people can expect to face. In this America, reproductive autonomy remains a pillar of women’s equality and livelihoods. Until Alito has lived in our house, he has no business knocking down its walls.

And of course he never will live in our house, because he’s a man.

How sad it is that we can’t do without women entirely, because of that one silly arrangement…

Brian Dowling has set his sights on becoming a first-time dad in 2022.

The Big Brother icon, 43, is hoping that this year will finally be the right time for him and husband Arthur Gourounlian to welcome their first child together.

The lovebirds, who tied the knot in 2015, have both shared their dreams of becoming parents over the years, but the process has been much harder than they first anticipated – partly due to the strict surrogacy laws in Ireland.

The process, you see – it turns out to be much harder than they expected because there has to be a woman involved somewhere along the line, and those bitches are so difficult. And Ireland just makes it worse! It has strict laws about borrowing a woman’s body to manufacture a baby for you! When it should be as simple as hopping on a bus!

As it stands, surrogacy is unregulated in Irish law and mothers of children born through surrogacy, even through gestational surrogacy – in which the child is biologically theirs – have no rights to their children.

Isn’t that what Brian and Arthur want? That the woman-machine they get to make the baby for them has (of course) no rights to their baby?

Brian, who hopes to welcome a child through surrogacy with husband Arthur, told Daily Mirror that he has to remind himself to keep a positive mindset amid the setbacks due to the strict Irish laws.

Has he considered kidnapping a woman?

“This isn’t just about gay guys and husbands trying to have families – everyone struggles. But I think in Ireland, the rules around surrogacy are absolutely ridiculous. The fact that the female egg is put into the surrogate, and then the surrogate is named as the biological mother just isn’t right – it’s not even related to the child.”

“It.”

Department of Ridiculous Headlines:

Can the women’s movement be as effective without the word ‘women’?

Of course not. Any other questions?

If you were raised on 1970s feminism, as I was, the linguistic shift toward phrases such as “birthing people” and “uterus havers” has been a bit jarring.

No it hasn’t. It’s been utterly enraging.

The incongruity between old language and new became particularly noticeable this week, after Politico published a leaked draft of a Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade.

Particularly noticeable and enraging. You’re god damn right it did.

In 1987, the National Women’s Law Center called the nomination of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court “a particular threat to women” because of his lack of deference to precedents such as Roe. Today, with Roe actually in danger, the organization warns that any justice who signs on to the leaked opinion “is fueling the harm and violence that will happen to people who become pregnant in this country.”

Exactly, and it needs to stop.

Nor is it alone in blurring the old focus on women; an official from Planned Parenthood in California, along with Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and feminist writer Mona Eltahawy, were among those who focused on “people” rather than “women.”

I too have been collecting examples. It’s horribly easy to do, because they’re ubiquitous.

It is hard to fault more inclusive language, of course

No, no it isn’t. Stop right there. It isn’t. We don’t order BLM to use “more inclusive language.” We don’t tell people campaigning to act on climate change to be more “inclusive” of oil companies. We don’t expect unions to “include” bosses. Use your damn brain. It’s very easy to fault “inclusive language” in fights where it doesn’t belong.

— but it is also impossible not to wonder whether “people who become pregnant” constitutes the same kind of effective political coalition that “women” did.

Wonder no more. Of course it doesn’t. Why? Because it veils the existence of women, which language has always done and continues to do. Invisible people can’t be an effective political coalition.

What used to be called “women’s health” is now for “individuals with a cervix,” media outlets (including this one) write about the threat to Roe and “pregnant individuals,” up-to-date midwives talk of “birthing people” and “chestfeeding,” and “women’s swimming” can now cover both those born with male bodies who identify as women and those born with female bodies who identify as men.

This shift has been controversial on the right, but seems to have engendered little discussion on the left about how it might affect future political organizing and other efforts once tightly tied to womanhood.

Well, there’s more than McArdle seems to think, but she’s right that there’s not nearly enough.

So in reducing women to their constituent body parts, or to discrete activities such as birthing, we may also reduce their political power to something closer to that of “people with colons.” Dignity and inclusion may be worth that sacrifice. But such a momentous decision should probably not be made without extensive debate, and a full understanding of what we’re giving up when we choose to write women out of the discussion.

Nothing is worth that sacrifice. Funny how it’s always women who are supposed to sacrifice, while the other campaigns get to go right on naming themselves.

Kathleen Stock has a dazzling piece on queeritude. It’s a must-read; I’ll just dangle a few amuse-bouches to tempt you.

In recent years, queerness has also become a fascinatingly multifunctional symbolic object in the psyche of the nation, simultaneously representing both sexily avant-garde transgression and fully paid-up membership of the British establishment.

Both a salad dressing and a drain cleaner!

A project on the history of the gerrymandered categories of “LGBTQ+” and “queer” is, of course, a fantastic idea; were it done properly, it would be genuinely exciting. Ideally such a museum would interrogate the sociological and historical conditions of its own movement. It might ask, for instance: what economic forces have shaped its transition from the gay rights movement of 20th Century to the present rainbow soup, in which many lesbians and gays feel they are not waving but drowning?

Read on.

Well how about that. Strangio manages to retweet Democracy Now using The Word not once but twice.

Alito cited Matthew Hale in his draft. Who? Bess Levin at Vanity Fair has the deets:

As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern notes, the draft—which could change before a the final ruling, as could the various justices’ votes—doesn’t just lay out the case for why Roe should be overturned, it goes full scorched earth. Alito, Stern writes, “does not seek out any middle path. He disparages Roe and its successors as dishonest, illegitimate, and destructive to the court, the country, and the Constitution. He quotes a wide range of anti-abortion activists, scholars, and judges who view abortion as immoral and barbaric; there’s even a footnote that approvingly cites Justice Clarence Thomas’s debunked theory that abortion is a tool of eugenics against Black Americans.” The opinion is an appalling, heinous attack on people who have relied on Roe for nearly half a century, and the most sickening part is that the conservative justice clearly doesn’t give a shit that obliterating the landmark ruling will ruin countless lives. In fact, one might argue, that’s all part of the plan. And if you needed further proof that Alito is pure evil and wants to take the U.S. back to a time when women’s bodies were property for men to control, know that one of the people he cited in his opinion was an English jurist who defended marital rape and had women executed for “witchcraft.”

Yes, Alito literally quoted this guy, who was born in 1609, as a defense for ending Roe v. Wade in 2022. “Two treatises by Sir Matthew Hale,” Alito enthusiastically writes, “described abortion of a quick child who died in the womb as a ‘great crime’ and a ‘great misprision.’ See M. Hale, Pleas of the Crown.”

Well if Matthew Hale said it it must be true.

Yet another one.

Reporter Chabeli Carrazana at 19th News:

In a leaked draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito argued that pregnant people don’t actually need access to abortion to ensure economic mobility — they already have it. 

Except he didn’t, as she immediately goes on to say.

According to the opinion, which was published by Politico Monday night, “unmarried pregnant women” — Alito does not include all pregnant people in his opinion — now have access to pregnancy discrimination protections, “guaranteed” medical leave “in many cases,” and medical costs that are “covered by insurance or government assistance.” 

Yes he does. All pregnant people are women. The normal wording is “pregnant women,” not “pregnant people.” It’s insulting to erase the word women from the conversation, and it’s very bad politics. If it were people who got pregnant this wouldn’t be happening.

The substance of the article is useful: it’s about economics and pregnancy, and the fact that Alito pretends the situation in the US is much better than it is. It’s a point worth making, but it’s not worth erasing women from the discussion for the sake of that point.

As Tim Harris said in his comment alerting us to this piece, “pregnant women” is said only in that one Alito quotation. “Pregnant people” is said six times.

Women don’t matter any more.

There seems to be a competition, declared or not, to caption Owen Jones’s selfie from today.

Aw, why so sad, little buddy?

Survivors’ Network is righteously indignant:

Survivors’ Network is a charity supporting survivors of sexual violence and abuse. We support survivors of all ages and genders in Sussex and this includes Trans and Non-Binary people. We are committed to intersectionality, and trans-inclusive feminism is central to our ethos.  

But does that mean women don’t get to have support without men around? It appears it does mean that:

We are disappointed to share that we have recently had legal action taken against us due to our trans-inclusive ethos. The claimant alleges that we have broken equalities law as (they allege) it is not legitimate or proportionate to welcome trans women into our women-only spaces.  

In other words they refuse to provide women-only spaces, while pretending they do provide women-only spaces, so they both refuse to provide what the claimant needs and blow smoke about what they’re doing. It’s sly, it’s smug, it’s self-flattering, and it throws women who need a women-only space under a very dirty bus.

If you’re a charity serving survivors of sexual violence and abuse, and you pretend to provide women-only services but actually don’t because you allow men who identify as women to use them, you’re just re-abusing your own damn clients. And then you pat yourselves on the back for it. Ugly.

The most important thing for us is the continued delivery of our services supporting survivors of sexual violence and abuse, and we want to reassure all of our current survivors and anyone seeking support that we are still here for you.

Unless you need a women-only space. We’re not here for you then – in fact we think you’re a monster and will say so in public. Men who call themselves women come first, bitch. See you in court.

Meanwhile Louisiana goes all in:

Louisiana lawmakers advanced a bill out of committee Wednesday that could make having an abortion grounds to be charged with homicide, going far beyond other state-level punishments for abortion, and could take effect whether the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade or not.

…

The bill “fully recognize[s] the human personhood of an unborn child” starting at the “moment of fertilization” and grants embryos and fetuses the same rights under law as human beings out of the womb.

The fertilized egg is “a child.”

This means having, assisting or performing an abortion would be classified as homicide.

Soon they’ll be executing women for menstruating.

The legislation would take effect immediately even if federal abortion rights are still in place and the Supreme Court hasn’t overturned Roe v. Wade, as the bill stipulates it should be enforced “without regard to the opinions and judgments of the Supreme Court of the United States in Roe v. Wade” or any other past or future abortion-related rulings, as well as any federal statutes or executive orders.

Can state legislatures do that? Just “stipulate” a “fuck what the Supreme Court says” and that becomes state law? I don’t think so. That’s why federal troops turned up in Little Rock that time – Eisenhower sent them to enforce the Brown ruling. The legislature wasn’t involved that I know of, but the point is that federal law can’t just be shrugged off by states.

The legislation is likely to get tied up in court if it gets enacted into law, as even proponents of the bill acknowledged Wednesday it may violate the Constitution.

With that whole “ignore the Supreme Court” thing.

Of course when you have a Supreme Court loaded with woman-hating theocratic bullies that can be bad news, but it’s still the case.

Louisiana is one of 13 states that’s set to immediately ban abortion if the court does strike Roe down through “trigger bans” that will go into effect once there’s a ruling. HB813 goes far beyond the state’s existing trigger ban, which would make performing an abortion a crime punishable by up to two years in prison and a $1,000 fine. While many abortion bans that will take effect make performing an abortion a felony punishable by prison time, none punish the person having the abortion themselves, making HB813 particularly extreme in relation.

It’s strange how eager people are to keep ratcheting up the displays of hatred for women. “We hate women more than you do!” “No we do!!”

Out of curiosity I looked for other reporting on Kamala Harris’s denunciation of the leaked abortion ruling and oh gee guess what NPR carefully left out all but one of her mentions of women.

Vice President Harris on Tuesday blasted a leaked draft that indicated that the Supreme Court had voted to overturn the landmark abortion rights decision Roe v. Wade, declaring that “women’s rights in America are under attack.”

“If the court overturns Roe v. Wade it will be a direct assault on freedom — on the fundamental right of self-determination to which all Americans are entitled,” she said.

NPR carefully did not quote:

Those Republican leaders who are trying to weaponize the use of the law against women — well, we say, “How dare they?” How dare they tell a woman what she can do and cannot do with her own body? How dare they? How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future? How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms?”

Way too fiery and feminist and angry, right? And way too not about trans people.

Politico on the other hand did not sanitize what she said.

Kamala Harris still says the W word.

Those Republican leaders who are trying to weaponize the use of the law against women — well, we say, “How dare they?” How dare they tell a woman what she can do and cannot do with her own body? How dare they? How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future? How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms?

…

She then used a term too few Democrats employ: “freedom.” “We must link arms in this fight. I invite all people to join us,” she said. “If you stand for freedom, for self-determination, for the right to privacy — if you stand for these principles, stand with us.” She added that “women’s issues are America’s issues. And democracies — democracies cannot be strong if the rights of women are under attack.”

Five appearances of the word there, and several of she and her. It is still possible!

H/t Mike Haubrich

Planned Parenthood is strikingly consistent about avoiding the word “women.”

“Oklahoman” is a weirdly awkward substitute for “women in Oklahoma” if you ask me.

Scroll scroll scroll, nothing changes.