There are two common — and contradictory — threads running through much of the mainstream media’s coverage of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade.
First: The Republican Party has spent 50 years arduously laying the groundwork for overturning the ruling. Judicial activism became a hot-button topic, and GOP presidents and legislators fought tooth and nail to nominate and confirm judges who would interpret the Constitution as it was written.
Grassroots organizations tirelessly networked, forming alliances between religious and social groups (particularly Roman Catholics and evangelical Christians) who were historically opposed to one another. The conservative movement coalesced around candidates that openly respected the right to life — and, what’s more, punished those who wished the abortion issue would just go away. After half a century, that effort bore fruit.
Second: The Democratic Party needs to find a way to snap its fingers right. this. instant. and make that half-century political project to restore constitutional values and respect for the right to life go away — because, I mean, do you realize Roe v. Wade isn’t the law of the land any more and that means I might not be able to kill an unborn baby if I engage in unsafe sexual practices and, oh my gosh, I can’t even.
Well, if you are stupid enough to believe that 50 years of political struggle can be undone with what former President Barack Obama once referred to as a pen and a phone simply because a Democrat sits in the White House, President Joe Biden isn’t going to disabuse you of that notion — even if he can’t openly defy the Supreme Court’s decision.
(Here at The Western Journal, we’ll be bringing you the latest developments in the abortion battle now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned. If you support our Christian, conservative news and analysis, please consider subscribing.)
On Friday, the president announced he was signing an executive order asking the Department of Justice, “much like they did in the Civil Rights era, to do something — do everything in their power to protect these women seeking to invoke their right” to abort their baby.
Among other things, this includes an abortion “task force, led by the White House Department — and the Department of Human Services” (Department of Health and Human Services, but who’s really cares?) which is “focused specifically on using every federal tool available to protect access to reproductive healthcare,” according to a transcript.
Stop for a minute and soak in the astounding nature of that statement. Joe Biden just compared abortion access with the civil rights movement.
Should Roe v. Wade have been overturned?
During the Memphis sanitation strike in 1968 — the months-long civil rights struggle where Martin Luther King Jr. was struck down by an assassin’s bullet — marchers famously took up placards reading simply: “I Am a Man.” In 2022, Biden’s people could print up similar signs: “Republicans Made Sure You Were Born.” Let’s see how that one goes over with black voters, shall we?
What’s more, the order would expand access to medicines that would induce an abortion and start cracking down on employers who don’t follow the birth control mandate baked into Obamacare.
And then there was also data-mining scare-mongering, too.
“Right now, in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, the Affordable Care Act guarantees insurance coverage for women’s health services, including — including free birth control. The executive order directs HHS to identify ways to expand access to reproductive health services, like IUDs, birth control pills, emergency contraception,” Biden said.
“And equally important, this executive order protects patient privacy and access to information, which looking at the press assembled before me, probably know more about it than I do. I’m not a tech guy. I’m learning.
“But right now, when you use a search engine or the app on your phone, companies collect your data, they sell it to other companies, and they even share it with law enforcement,” he continued. “There’s an increasing concern that extremist governors and others will try to get that data off of your phone, which is out there in the ether, to find what you’re seeking, where you’re going and what you’re doing with regard to your healthcare.”
Ma! Gramps is scaring the kids with the talk about how the big flashy internet demon fascists are going to come and knock down your door if you don’t play along with “The Handmaid’s Tale” people again! Trust me, Joe: If those “extremist governors” (read: Republicans) were fixing to get people’s data “out there in the ether” to charge them with a politically motivated crime, Hunter Biden’s laptop problems would have begun long before October of 2020.
While it’s unclear who’ll be running this task force, President Biden was flanked by HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra. Becerra’s confirmation in 2021 was controversial in part because he had no particularly strong medical background, but instead, he came straight from a stint as the attorney general of the state of California.
The wisdom of that pick seems to be coming into focus, as a lawyer of Becerra’s stature would be an asset in protecting the unquestioned right to one very specific medical service — even though it’s not particularly healthy to the unborn human fetus. As for the rest of the spectrum of health, humanity and the services the government can provide to improve those two things, I’m guessing this guy isn’t your huckleberry, nor was he ever meant to be.
Biden closed with the same lie about the majority decision that’s been repeated ad nauseam since it was handed down.
“Remember the reasoning of this decision has an impact much beyond Roe and the right to privacy generally,” Biden said.
“Marriage equality, contraception and so much more is at risk. This decision affects everyone — unrelated to choice — beyond choice. We cannot allow an out-of-control Supreme Court, working in conjunction with the extremist elements of the Republican Party, to take away freedoms and our personal autonomy.”
Except, of course, it doesn’t. Anyone who’s read some of the decision — as opposed to just digesting the outrage or the celebration — knows the majority specifically stated they weren’t challenging the legal concept of substantive due process, which is what those decisions rest upon. The decision, instead, merely found Roe and its attendant cases were “egregiously wrong from the start.” (Biden is referring to a concurrence by Justice Thomas, which challenges the concept of substantive due process — but he was the only one to sign on to that concurrence and good luck seeing it making much of an impact. Not that it shouldn’t, but that’s for another day.)
And yet, for some activists, this still isn’t good enough.
“Expanding medication abortion access can’t help a state where telemedicine is illegal,” said Robin Marty, the operations director of the West Alabama Women’s Center, in an interview with Politico. (While the context is not made entirely clear, this sounds very much like lamenting that doctors cannot consult patients in states where abortion is illegal — either in toto or at the point the pregnancy has reached — and simply ship them the drugs necessary to kill the child.)
“Providing protections for traveling across state lines won’t do anything for those who simply can’t handle the logistical aspect, no matter how much money is given to them. And saddest of all, additional contraception funding — which should be the best way to prevent abortion, not abortion bans — will do almost nothing in a state like Alabama, where Title X funding is dispersed through county health departments only and the wait for an appointment for IUDs and implants is already months long,”
“Maybe the reality is there really is nothing that can be done federally. If so, that should terrify everyone.”
Yes, apparently the left can’t summon its magic wand pen-and-phone and make 50 years of political grassroots organizing against imperious, unaccountable judicial activism go away in a week. That’s what scares this abortion provider.
What should scare you, however, is that there are plenty of Robin Martys out there who want rule by magic wand. For them, this is just the first step in openly defying and tearing down institutional guardrails like the Supreme Court.
Sure, task forces and increased Obamacare protections sound perfectly harmless. We won, they lost, they’re trying to save face. However, we need to keep the great paradox of this whole debate in mind: The right has played by the rules in order to secure the right for each individual state to handle abortion as they see fit — not banning abortions, period, just returning it to their jurisdiction. Now, the left wants to violently swipe their hand across the chess board and knock the pieces across the room. Let’s start over again, they say, with the same rules as before this decision.
No norms. No guardrails. No institutions. The left can’t have those.
