JULY 23, 2025

Reposting: 5 Questions on Women’s bodily Autonomy

I am a seventy-seven year old mother of two daughters, and grandmother of one granddaughter and one great-granddaughter. I have been the victim of inappropriate sexual behavior and predation within my family, as well as by neighbors and strangers; other members of my family have also been victims. I remember each and every event vividly to this day, stillrepeatedly questioning how I could have, or should have handled or avoided them better. I will always have those questions.I don’t want my granddaughter or my great-granddaughter to ever have those questions. I never got pregnant from those types of events, but others have and still do, even granddaughters and great-granddaughters.

But I now have many questions and thoughts about whether we needed Roe v. Wade. I have lived through a period of American history that has granted more rights to the disenfranchised of our nation after long fought battles for equal rights. Women, people of color, indigenous peoples, and members of the LGBTQ community have been grudgingly granted human and civil rights they have always deserved, after finally overcoming centuries-old and eternally unwarranted biases. We, as a nation, have still not achieved full equality; but we’ve been moving closer to it. With the overturning of the half-century old Roe v. Wade decision on abortion rights, I want to know what has changed to make that ruling not longer settled law. The right to end a pregnancy has been the law for two generations.

Since the end of slavery, we have never taken away rights in this nation. I have Five BIG Questions!

BIG Question Number One: Is Overturning Roe v. Wade about power and rights?  YES. Some men, in and out of government, think they have the right to exert power at the expense of other people’s rights.

Question: Did we all hear Republican senators dismiss and attack a female collegeprofessor testifying that she was assaulted sexually and traumatized by Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who had already lied in prior nomination hearings? YES. These senators also offered sentiments expressing ‘Boys will be boys.’ ‘Just dyoung kids sowing their wild oats.’ ‘We’ve all been there.’ or ‘No harm, no foul.’ attitudes. And, in solidarity, they supported his lies. (Anyone, regardless of gender, who has been the victim of sexual predation knows there is harm; there is injury, and there is lasting trauma.) These men didn’t care because they never were the victims.

Question: Did Justice Alito really cite Pleas of the Crown? YES. That’s the 1736 treatise (published six decades after author Sir Matthew Hale’s death) that defended and laid the foundation for the world-wide marital rape exemption. Alito’s argument for ending Roe v. Wade included a citation from the man who literally had two women executed in a witch hunt.

Question: Are we still giving women less equality under our criminal laws? YES. Leges Henrici Primi, a very early treatise of ‘laws’ in the reign of Henry I, written c. 1115, treated pre-quickening abortion as a misdemeanor, and post-quickening abortion as having lesser penalty than murder or homicide. After almost a thousand years, pregnant American women still have fewer rights over their own bodies. In spite of the fact that the rights of U.S. citizens regarding autonomy or sole sovereignty over their bodies (regardless of gender) are not specified in the constitution or its amendments, Federal and State governments and courts have taken the position that they have power and jurisdiction over only people who have uteruses and are of child-bearing age (pubescent girls, trans men, cis-gender women). We are citizens, voters, and the majority of the nation’s population, yet we don’t have the same rights as cis-gender men. The Ninth Amendment is interpreted to include natural rights into the Constitution suggesting that all of the most important freedoms might not have been listed. Other amendments and laws have followed, but none specifically articulate that men have more rights than others. And still Leges Henrici Primi influences (with its current viability caveat) the Supreme Court.

Question: Did Congressman Matt Gaetz, known for bragging about his sexual conquests, with especially young women, really tweet this? YES. @mattgaetz · 11H

Question: Do American men like Matt Gaetz feel entitled to sovereignty over women’s bodies? YES. While millions of heterosexual American men enjoy mutual, loving relationships which include sexual intimacy, there are legions of men who were taught to feel entitled (by generations of entitled men) and to believe their sexual attention to any woman should make her feel blessed as opposed to used, abused or taken advantage of. These men use alcohol, drugs, threats, gifts, or lies to gain entry into vaginas. That is their only intent, except for the illusion of power it gives them and the actual power it rips away from their sexual partners (consenting or not). In previous centuries men, stronger, larger, heavier, and, if necessary, meaner than the women and girls they’d subjugated, relied upon brute power when charm failed.

Now, in the year 2025, when generations of women have acquired more acumen, knowledge, skills, interests, and capabilities in addition to the ability to bear children, we have “Incels” who rage that women won’t give them the attention and sex they so sorely need and deserve. Women have had to come from behind for centuries, finally earning comparable pay, professions, civil equality, and personal respect. They have more life options than simply being a receptacle for semen. They have every right to prefer caring, respectful men in their lives. That must be really hard for men who think they are superior to women. What better way to denigrate, devalue, and violate other humans than to simply be superior to them. Power, it’s an old device and has worked for millennia.

Seriously, how many of the women raging against the overturning of Roe are over-educated, under-loved millennials who sadly return from protests to a lonely microwave dinner with their cats, and no bumble matches?

BIG Question Number Two: Is overturning Roe v. Wade about conscience and religion?

YES. “Quickening,’ “ensoulment” or “animation,” are all terms describing the first sensations of movement of the fetus in utero. This movement is generally felt by women between the third and fifth month of pregnancy. Pregnancy is a state of potential human life. When or if humanness occurs during pregnancy, is a religious belief.

From a Jewish perspective from biblical times, the mother’s life is prioritized. Ending a pregnancy is considered more through a social lens than from a theological one. The woman’s personhood is recognized over that of the unborn. The child’s personhood is recognized at birth. Currently, the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodoxy, Evangelical Protestant and some mainline Protestant churches oppose abortion in varying degrees. At the same time other mainline Protestant churches favor it, also in varying degrees, allowing the practice. Of course that doesn’t mean all in their congregations hold entirely the same positions. Support for abortion had increased in the US over the life of Roe v. Wade to seventy percent of Americans.

Looking at 2020 data on Americans who have no opposition to abortion, finds that cohort includes 33% of Evangelical Christians, 53% of Historically Black Protestants, 48% of Catholics, 80% of Jews, 60% of Muslims, 80% of Hindus, 80% of Agnostics, and 87% of Atheists. Only 30% of Americans, if that, actually oppose abortion on religious grounds.

Question: Does it matter what I believe? YES. I believe for most people abortion is the lesser evil of two bad choices. I also believe that our government (currently run mostly by men) should never require a woman to relinquish control of her own body. If you don’t believe in abortion, don’t get one or pay for one. But, you’re only in charge of your own life.

Question: If overturning Roe v. Wade is about religion and conscience, aren’t the First Amendment’s protections for religious freedom supposed to support a woman’s right to follow her own beliefs and conscience without interference or persecution? YES. But, for whatever their reasons, religious or political, some Supreme Court Justices (several of whom apparently lied to get their high court positions) are choosing to ignore, devalue or redefine these Bill of Rights protections

Question: Is the posed religious and moral overtones of the argument to overturn Row v. Wade in essence government establishment of religion? YES. Establishing a court or government preferred belief structure also violates the First Amendment. With a nation of many religions and an active conservative movement to create minority rule, proffering a national statement of faith and morality to end the right to abortion is a power play. The freedom to practice one’s own religion or lack thereof without interference or persecution means the right to learn, think, and have convictions. If a religious minority of the nation has the actual power to take away our rights, one by one, or all at once, only that minority will have rights. Then that is called theocracy akin to the Taliban rule of Afghanistan. If it is not actually a religious minority that enjoys all the power and rights it may be an autocracy, an oligarchy, a dictatorship, totalitarianism, or an aristocracy; but it won’t be a democracy. (If it is truly a religious minority, they certainly would never use their rights, power and wealth to secure abortions for their daughters, wives, girlfriends, or mistresses.)

Big Question Number Three: Does overturning Roe v. Wade harm our nation?

YES. It will weaken our constitutional rights, specified or unspecified. Loss of rights to marry, or the freedoms of speech, the press, or assembly could lead to Autocracy, Fascism, or Dictatorship. Overturning Row v. Wade will build on a pattern of the last several years: ignoring and destroying governmental norms and practices. It will normalize rule breaking. It will weaken laws.

Question: Do we need laws and government? YES. If we want to have roads to drive on, reliable cars to drive, safe food to eat, or other products we can buy rather than grow or create entirely for ourselves, we need the organization of government. We need it to enjoy publicly funded education or to have access to quality medical care and many other things that we enjoy (if not take for granted) here in the US. Unless we’ve chosen to stay away from society totally, we are part of a social contract. All nations, large or small are social contracts. A governing model is created that allows people to function as individuals or small groups, while hiring government to handle large, society-wide processes. State and county governments handle local roads, utilities, fire fighting, public education, accreditation for professions, construction standards for buildings, laws for behavior to protect individuals from victimization, danger, and recklessness, policing to enforce the laws, assistance to those who need it, and many other issues. The federal government has officers, courts and agencies to provide for national security, health and safety, the administration of justice, large infrastructure projects, the creation of laws and bills for funding, and monetary policy to encourage a healthy economy. While we could try to use the age-old barter system, it would be insufficient in today’s more complex world where we need to have money, policies, and regulations: we have to have a government.

Question: Did abortion actually become a federal issue? YES. It’s a long story. The colonies and then the United States observed the English policies, recognizing that the before ‘quickening’ ending a pregnancy was an option to reduce family sizes and to not overburden the finances and stability of the household. Though later not specified in our new nation’s written constitution, this policy was continuously followed for a century. Many midwives and others offered herbal treatments. There were laws; but ending a pregnancy after quickening was not a serious crime.

The marketplace got into the abortion business with abortifacient advertising becoming highly effective in the United States. Current estimates of mid-19th century abortion rates in the US show between 20% and 25% of all pregnancies in our nation were ended by abortions. Before the turn of the 19th century, most abortions were sought by single women impregnated out of wedlock. But reported in limited studies in American medical journals in the mid 1800s, over half of abortions were pursued by married women, and well over half of them already had one or more children.

Also in the marketplace, physicians who were the leading advocates of abortion criminalization laws, appear to have been motivated at least in part by advances in their medical knowledge. Science had discovered that conception started a basically continuous process of development, that when completed produced a new human being. Many physicians concluded that it was just as wrong to terminate a pregnancy before quickening as after quickening; The Hippocratic Oath and the medical mentality of that age to defend the value of human life shaped their opinions about abortion. But doctors had practical reasons to advocate for anti-abortion laws. Abortion providers tended to be medically untrained and not in medical societies; they were considered ‘irregulars’ by doctors wanting to standardize medical care. The more formalized medical providers disliked the competition of the less costly “irregulars.”

States began to make abortions illegal. One reason given for such legislation was that abortions had been performed by dangerous methods including surgery. Though science and technology advanced and abortion methods had improved, most women still would resort to illegal unsafe methods, also known as “back alley” abortions.

After the civil war, the blame for abortions was shifting to the developing women’s rights movement though many feminists of the time opposed abortion. But in 1869, an anonymous feminist contributor wrote about the problem stating that attempting to pass a new law to ban abortions (as such a law didn’t exist at that time), would not be the solution; it would “be only mowing off the top of the noxious weed, while the root remains.” Seduction or forcible sexual assault of unmarried women and marital rape were ills which feminists believed caused the need for abortions, as men did not recognize or respect women’s rights to remain virgins or to decline physical advances. More socialist views among many feminists recognized further the need for abortion services among the very poor (and some even performed those services).

Physicians carried their anti-abortion agenda to state legislatures around the nation, pushing not only anti-abortion laws, but laws prohibiting birth control. Then came the Comstock Law, which made it illegal to produce, publish, or distribute information pertaining to the procurement of abortion, abortion, or the prevention of conception or venereal disease, even for medical students, as such materials were obscene. By 1900, abortion was a crime in every state. But some states allowed abortions in limited circumstances, usually to protect the woman’s life or to end pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. Abortions continued to occur, however, and became increasingly available.

With medical and scientific advances, more reasons to allow for abortions were added in states: protecting the physical and mental health or well-being of the woman, the probability or certainty of abnormalities or deformities in the fetus, or detecting untreatable conditions that would render the fetus unable to sustain life outside womb.

But more and more reports of women’s injuries and deaths due to illegal abortions increased the nation’s calls for legalizing abortion. Before Roe v. Wade, thirty states prohibited abortion with no exceptions, sixteen states banned abortion except in certain noted special circumstances, three states allowed their residents to obtain abortions, and New York allowed abortions to those who sought them. With Roe v. Wade, abortion became a federal issue.

Question: Doesn’t the Fourth Amendment protect a person from unreasonable searches and seizures? YES. An individual cannot be seized, nor can his or her personal records or papers. I would think that demanding medical records would be unreasonable search and seizure, and forcing a woman to surrender control of her body for several months (including the forced endurance of the physical, mentally tortuous, and dangerous delivery of a child she didn’t want to have) is a seizure of her being and her rights. It is also a brutal punishment for committing no offense.

Question: Was Roe v. Wade “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition?” YES. Looking at US demographic data, 77% of Americans with uteruses are now or have been of child-bearing age during the half-century of Roe v. Wade. And those who are younger (and their parents) were reasonably expecting the same rights when they hit puberty. This is the history and tradition we all know. It is deeply rooted in our society and in our rights to privacy. None of us live in the eighteenth century. Justice Alito feels that banning abortion is as “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition” as stockades, witch-burnings, and ‘scarlet letters.’

Question: Will the overturning of Roe v. Wade reduce abortions? NO. While it will reduce the number of safe abortions, it will increase the number of unsafe, illegal procedures. Women of moderate and higher financial circumstance will be able to travel to other states or countries that offer medically safe procedures to terminate a pregnancy. Many poor women are impregnated. Perhaps they can’t afford to add another child to their family, or to lose a scholarship, or to raise a child alone. Others can’t bear the trauma of giving birth to a child of rape or incest, but haven’t the means to secure a safe abortion. The poor will be the seekers of cheap, illegal abortions; some will pay with their lives.

Big Question Number Four: Is the Supreme Court moving to reduce the rights (both civil and human) of individuals?

YES. Both the ‘Hobby Lobby’ and ‘Citizen’s United’ decisions have already granted greater power and rights to corporations, larger groups, and organizations, reducing the political and economic power of the individual person.

These questions are directly to The Supreme Court, with statements (in quotes) taken directly from The Supreme Court’s official website: supremecourt.gov. (2023)

Question: Why is Roe v. Wade, a decision on a complicated situation in 1973, no longer a legitimate tool “assuring individual rights, as well as in maintaining a ‘living Constitution’ or providing the “balance between society’s need for order and the individual’s right to freedom?”

Question: How does overturning Roe v. Wade damage or weaken the “society’s need for order?”

Quote from The Supreme Court’s official website, emphasis is mine.

“The Constitution of the United States is a carefully balanced document. It is designed to provide for a national government sufficiently strong and flexible to meet the needs of the republic, yet sufficiently limited and just to protect the guaranteed rights of citizens; it permits a balance between society’s need for order and the individual’s right to freedom. To assure these ends, the Framers of the Constitution created three independent and coequal branches of government. That this Constitution has provided continuous democratic government through the periodic stresses of more than two centuries illustrates the genius of the American system of government.

The complex role of the Supreme Court in this system derives from its authority to invalidate legislation or executive actions which, in the Court’s considered judgment, conflict with the Constitution. This power of “judicial review” has given the Court a crucial responsibility in assuring individual rights, as well as in maintaining a “living Constitution” whose broad provisions are continually applied to complicated new situations.”

Question: If the right to privacy to make a personal medical choice, such as obtaining an abortion, is not explicitly provided in the Constitution, why was it not “invoked’ with the Roe v. Wade decision?

Question: Why was the Supreme Court able to invoke the power of judicial review for itself, when that power was not explicitly provided in the Constitution?

Quote from The Supreme Court’s official website, emphasis is mine.

“While the function of judicial review is not explicitly provided in the Constitution, it had been anticipated before the adoption of that document. Prior to 1789, state courts had already overturned legislative acts which conflicted with state constitutions. Moreover, many of the Founding Fathers expected the Supreme Court to assume this role in regard to the Constitution; Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, for example, had underlined the importance of judicial review in the Federalist Papers, which urged adoption of the Constitution.”

Despite this background the Court’s power of judicial review was not confirmed until 1803, when it was invoked by Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison. In this decision, the Chief Justice asserted that the Supreme Court’s responsibility to overturn unconstitutional legislation was a necessary consequence of its sworn duty to uphold the Constitution. That oath could not be fulfilled any other way. “It is emphatically the province of the judicial department to say what the law is,” he declared. In retrospect, it is evident that constitutional interpretation and application were made necessary by the very nature of the Constitution. The Founding Fathers had wisely worded that document in rather general terms leaving it open to future elaboration to meet changing conditions.”

Question: Isn’t overturning of Roe v. Wade creating “a crisis of human affairs?”

Quote from The Supreme Court’s official website, emphasis is mine.

“Chief Justice Marshall expressed the challenge which the Supreme Court faces in maintaining free government by noting: “We must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding . . . intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.”

Question: Why isn’t Roe v. Wade considered “settled law” and what has changed since all of the recent Supreme Court nominees stated it was “settled law” during their confirmation testimony.

Quote from The Supreme Court’s official website, emphasis is mine.

“When the Supreme Court rules on a constitutional issue, that judgment is virtually final; its decisions can be altered only by the rarely used procedure of constitutional amendment or by a new ruling of the Court. However, when the Court interprets a statute, new legislative action can be taken.”

JULY 23, 2025

Edit”July 23, 2025″

Reposting: 5 Questions on Women’s bodily Autonomy

I am a seventy-seven year old mother of two daughters, and grandmother of one granddaughter and one great-granddaughter. I have been the victim of inappropriate sexual behavior and predation within my family, as well as by neighbors and strangers; other members of my family have also been victims. I remember each and every event vividly to this day, stillrepeatedly questioning how I could have, or should have handled or avoided them better. I will always have those questions.I don’t want my granddaughter or my great-granddaughter to ever have those questions. I never got pregnant from those types of events, but others have and still do, even granddaughters and great-granddaughters.

But I now have many questions and thoughts about whether we needed Roe v. Wade.I have lived through a period of American history that has granted more rights to the disenfranchised of our nation after long fought battles for equal rights. Women, people of color, indigenous peoples, and members of the LGBTQ community have been grudgingly granted human and civil rights they have always deserved, after finally overcoming centuries-old and eternally unwarranted biases. We, as a nation, have still not achieved full equality; but we’ve been moving closer to it. With the overturning of the half-century old Roe v. Wade decision on abortion rights, I want to know what has changed to make that ruling not longer settled law. The right to end a pregnancy has been the law for two generations.

Since the end of slavery, we have never taken away rights in this nation. I have Five BIG Questions!

BIG Question Number One: Is Overturning Roe v. Wade about power and rights?  YES. Some men, in and out of government, think they have the right to employ power at the expense of other people’s rights.

Question: Did we all hear Republican senators dismiss and attack a female collegeprofessor testifying that she was assaulted sexually and traumatized by Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who had already lied in prior nomination hearings? YES. These senators also offered sentiments expressing ‘Boys will be boys.’ ‘Justyoung kids sowing their wild oats.’ ‘We’ve all been there.’ or ‘No harm, no foul.’ attitudes. And, in solidarity, they supported his lies. (Anyone, regardless of gender, who has been the victim of sexual predation knows there is harm; there is injury, and there is lasting trauma.) These men didn’t care because they never were the victims.

Question: Did Justice Alito really cite Pleas of the Crown? YES. That’s the 1736 treatise (published six decades after author Sir Matthew Hale’s death) that defended and laid the foundation for the world-wide marital rape exemption. Alito’s argument for ending Roe v. Wade included a citation from the man who literally had two women executed in a witch hunt.

Question: Are we still giving women less equality under our criminal laws? YES. Leges Henrici Primi, a very early treatise of ‘laws’ in the reign of Henry I, written c. 1115, treated pre-quickening abortion as a misdemeanor, and post-quickening abortion as having lesser penalty than murder or homicide. After almost a thousand years, pregnant American women still have fewer rights over their own bodies. In spite of the fact that the rights of U.S. citizens regarding autonomy or sole sovereignty over their bodies (regardless of gender) are not specified in the constitution or its amendments, Federal and State governments and courts have taken the position that they have power and jurisdiction over only people who have uteruses and are of child-bearing age (pubescent girls, trans men, cis-gender women). We are citizens, voters, and the majority of the nation’s population, yet we don’t have the same rights as cis-gender men. The Ninth Amendment is interpreted to include natural rights into the Constitution suggesting that all of the most important freedoms might not have been listed. Other amendments and laws have followed, but none specifically articulate that men have more rights than others. And still Leges Henrici Primi influences (with its current viability caveat) the Supreme Court.

Question: Did Congressman Matt Gaetz, known for bragging about his sexual conquests, with especially young women, really tweet this? YES. @mattgaetz · 11H

Question: Do American men like Matt Gaetz feel entitled to sovereignty over women’s bodies? YES. While millions of heterosexual American men enjoy mutual, loving relationships which include sexual intimacy, there are legions of men who were taught to feel entitled (by generations of entitled men) and to believe their sexual attention to any woman should make her feel blessed as opposed to used, abused or taken advantage of. These men use alcohol, drugs, threats, gifts, or lies to gain entry into vaginas. That is their only intent, except for the illusion of power it gives them and the actual power it rips away from their sexual partners (consenting or not). In previous centuries men, stronger, larger, heavier, and, if necessary, meaner than the women and girls they’d subjugated, relied upon brute power when charm failed.

Now, in the year 2025, when generations of women have acquired more acumen, knowledge, skills, interests, and capabilities in addition to the ability to bear children, we have “Incels” who rage that women won’t give them the attention and sex they so sorely need and deserve. Women have had to come from behind for centuries, finally earning comparable pay, professions, civil equality, and personal respect. They have more life options than simply being a receptacle for semen. They have every right to prefer caring, respectful men in their lives. That must be really hard for men who think they are superior to women. What better way to denigrate, devalue, and violate other humans than to simply be superior to them. Power, it’s an old device and has worked for millennia.

How many of the women rallying against overturning Roe are over-educated, under-loved millennials who sadly return from protests to a lonely microwave dinner with their cats, and no bumble matches?

BIG Question Number Two: Is overturning Roe v. Wade about conscience and religion?

YES. “Quickening,’ “ensoulment” or “animation,” are all terms describing the first sensations of movement of the fetus in utero. This movement is generally felt by women between the third and fifth month of pregnancy. Pregnancy is a state of potential human life. When or if humanness occurs during pregnancy, is a religious belief.

From a Jewish perspective from biblical times, the mother’s life is prioritized. Ending a pregnancy is considered more through a social lens than from a theological one. The woman’s personhood is recognized over that of the unborn. The child’s personhood is recognized at birth. Currently, the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodoxy, Evangelical Protestant and some mainline Protestant churches oppose abortion in varying degrees. At the same time other mainline Protestant churches favor it, also in varying degrees, allowing the practice. Of course that doesn’t mean all in their congregations hold entirely the same positions. Support for abortion had increased in the US over the life of Roe v. Wade to seventy percent of Americans.

Looking at 2020 data on Americans who have no opposition to abortion, finds that cohort includes 33% of Evangelical Christians, 53% of Historically Black Protestants, 48% of Catholics, 80% of Jews, 60% of Muslims, 80% of Hindus, 80% of Agnostics, and 87% of Atheists. Only 30% of Americans, if that, actually oppose abortion on religious grounds.

Question: Does it matter what I believe? YES. I believe for most people abortion is the lesser evil of two bad choices. I also believe that our government (currently run mostly by men) should never require a woman to relinquish control of her own body. If you don’t believe in abortion, don’t get one or pay for one. But, you’re only in charge of your own life.

Question: If overturning Roe v. Wade is about religion and conscience, aren’t the First Amendment’s protections for religious freedom supposed to support a woman’s right to follow her own beliefs and conscience without interference or persecution? YES. But, for whatever their reasons, religious or political, some Supreme Court Justices (several of whom apparently lied to get their high court positions) are choosing to ignore, devalue or redefine these Bill of Rights protections

Question: Is the posed religious and moral overtones of the argument to overturn Row v. Wade in essence government establishment of religion? YES. Establishing a court or government preferred belief structure also violates the First Amendment. With a nation of many religions and an active conservative movement to create minority rule, proffering a national statement of faith and morality to end the right to abortion is a power play. The freedom to practice one’s own religion or lack thereof without interference or persecution means the right to learn, think, and have convictions. If a religious minority of the nation has the actual power to take away our rights, one by one, or all at once, only that minority will have rights. Then that is called theocracy akin to the Taliban rule of Afghanistan. If it is not actually a religious minority that enjoys all the power and rights it may be an autocracy, an oligarchy, a dictatorship, totalitarianism, or an aristocracy; but it won’t be a democracy. (If it is truly a religious minority, they certainly would never use their rights, power and wealth to secure abortions for their daughters, wives, girlfriends, or mistresses.)

Big Question Number Three: Does overturning Roe v. Wade harm our nation?

YES. It will weaken our constitutional rights, specified or unspecified. Loss of rights to marry, or the freedoms of speech, the press, or assembly could lead to Autocracy, Fascism, or Dictatorship. Overturning Row v. Wade will build on a pattern of the last several years: ignoring and destroying governmental norms and practices. It will normalize rule breaking. It will weaken laws.

Question: Do we need laws and government? YES. If we want to have roads to drive on, reliable cars to drive, safe food to eat, or other products we can buy rather than grow or create entirely for ourselves, we need the organization of government. We need it to enjoy publicly funded education or to have access to quality medical care and many other things that we enjoy (if not take for granted) here in the US. Unless we’ve chosen to stay away from society totally, we are part of a social contract. All nations, large or small are social contracts. A governing model is created that allows people to function as individuals or small groups, while hiring government to handle large, society-wide processes. State and county governments handle local roads, utilities, fire fighting, public education, accreditation for professions, construction standards for buildings, laws for behavior to protect individuals from victimization, danger, and recklessness, policing to enforce the laws, assistance to those who need it, and many other issues. The federal government has officers, courts and agencies to provide for national security, health and safety, the administration of justice, large infrastructure projects, the creation of laws and bills for funding, and monetary policy to encourage a healthy economy. While we could try to use the age-old barter system, it would be insufficient in today’s more complex world where we need to have money, policies, and regulations: we have to have a government.

Question: Did abortion actually become a federal issue? YES. It’s a long story. The colonies and then the United States observed the English policies, recognizing that the before ‘quickening’ ending a pregnancy was an option to reduce family sizes and to not overburden the finances and stability of the household. Though later not specified in our new nation’s written constitution, this policy was continuously followed for a century. Many midwives and others offered herbal treatments. There were laws; but ending a pregnancy after quickening was not a serious crime.

The marketplace got into the abortion business with abortifacient advertising becoming highly effective in the United States. Current estimates of mid-19th century abortion rates in the US show between 20% and 25% of all pregnancies in our nation were ended by abortions. Before the turn of the 19th century, most abortions were sought by single women impregnated out of wedlock. But reported in limited studies in American medical journals in the mid 1800s, over half of abortions were pursued by married women, and well over half of them already had one or more children.

Also in the marketplace, physicians who were the leading advocates of abortion criminalization laws, appear to have been motivated at least in part by advances in their medical knowledge. Science had discovered that conception started a basically continuous process of development, that when completed produced a new human being. Many physicians concluded that it was just as wrong to terminate a pregnancy before quickening as after quickening; The Hippocratic Oath and the medical mentality of that age to defend the value of human life shaped their opinions about abortion. But doctors had practical reasons to advocate for anti-abortion laws. Abortion providers tended to be medically untrained and not in medical societies; they were considered ‘irregulars’ by doctors wanting to standardize medical care. The more formalized medical providers disliked the competition of the less costly “irregulars.”

States began to make abortions illegal. One reason given for such legislation was that abortions had been performed by dangerous methods including surgery. Though science and technology advanced and abortion methods had improved, most women still would resort to illegal unsafe methods, also known as “back alley” abortions.

After the civil war, the blame for abortions was shifting to the developing women’s rights movement though many feminists of the time opposed abortion. But in 1869, an anonymous feminist contributor wrote about the problem stating that attempting to pass a new law to ban abortions (as such a law didn’t exist at that time), would not be the solution; it would “be only mowing off the top of the noxious weed, while the root remains.” Seduction or forcible sexual assault of unmarried women and marital rape were ills which feminists believed caused the need for abortions, as men did not recognize or respect women’s rights to remain virgins or to decline physical advances. More socialist views among many feminists recognized further the need for abortion services among the very poor (and some even performed those services).

Physicians carried their anti-abortion agenda to state legislatures around the nation, pushing not only anti-abortion laws, but laws prohibiting birth control. Then came the Comstock Law, which made it illegal to produce, publish, or distribute information pertaining to the procurement of abortion, abortion, or the prevention of conception or venereal disease, even for medical students, as such materials were obscene. By 1900, abortion was a crime in every state. But some states allowed abortions in limited circumstances, usually to protect the woman’s life or to end pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. Abortions continued to occur, however, and became increasingly available.

With medical and scientific advances, more reasons to allow for abortions were added in states: protecting the physical and mental health or well-being of the woman, the probability or certainty of abnormalities or deformities in the fetus, or detecting untreatable conditions that would render the fetus unable to sustain life outside womb.

But more and more reports of women’s injuries and deaths due to illegal abortions increased the nation’s calls for legalizing abortion. Before Roe v. Wade, thirty states prohibited abortion with no exceptions, sixteen states banned abortion except in certain noted special circumstances, three states allowed their residents to obtain abortions, and New York allowed abortions to those who sought them. With Roe v. Wade, abortion became a federal issue.

Question: Doesn’t the Fourth Amendment protect a person from unreasonable searches and seizures? YES. An individual cannot be seized, nor can his or her personal records or papers. I would think that demanding medical records would be unreasonable search and seizure, and forcing a woman to surrender control of her body for several months (including the forced endurance of the physical, mentally tortuous, and dangerous delivery of a child she didn’t want to have) is a seizure of her being and her rights. It is also a brutal punishment for committing no offense.

Question: Was Roe v. Wade “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition?” YES. Looking at US demographic data, 77% of Americans with uteruses are now or have been of child-bearing age during the half-century of Roe v. Wade. And those who are younger (and their parents) were reasonably expecting the same rights when they hit puberty. This is the history and tradition we all know. It is deeply rooted in our society and in our rights to privacy. None of us live in the eighteenth century. Justice Alito feels that banning abortion is as “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition” as stockades, witch-burnings, and ‘scarlet letters.’

Question: Will th overturning of Roe v. Wade reduce abortions? NO. While it will reduce the number of safe abortions, it will increase the number of unsafe, illegal procedures. Women of moderate and higher financial circumstance will be able to travel to other states or countries that offer medically safe procedures to terminate a pregnancy. Many poor women are impregnated. Perhaps they can’t afford to add another child to their family, or to lose a scholarship, or to raise a child alone. Others can’t bear the trauma of giving birth to a child of rape or incest, but haven’t the means to secure a safe abortion. The poor will be the seekers of cheap, illegal abortions; some will pay with their lives.

Big Question Number Four: Is the Supreme Court moving to reduce the rights (both civil and human) of individuals?

YES. Both the ‘Hobby Lobby’ and ‘Citizen’s United’ decisions have already granted greater power and rights to corporations, larger groups, and organizations, reducing the political and economic power of the each person.

The rest of my questions are directly to The Supreme Court, with statements (in quotes) taken directly from The Supreme Court’s official website: supremecourt.gov.

Question: Why is Roe v. Wade, a decision on a complicated situation in 1973, no longer a legitimate tool “assuring individual rights, as well as in maintaining a ‘living Constitution’ or providing the “balance between society’s need for order and the individual’s right to freedom?”

Question: How does overturning Roe v. Wade damage or weaken the “society’s need for order?”

Quote from The Supreme Court’s official website, emphasis is mine.

“The Constitution of the United States is a carefully balanced document. It is designed to provide for a national government sufficiently strong and flexible to meet the needs of the republic, yet sufficiently limited and just to protect the guaranteed rights of citizens; it permits a balance between society’s need for order and the individual’s right to freedom. To assure these ends, the Framers of the Constitution created three independent and coequal branches of government. That this Constitution has provided continuous democratic government through the periodic stresses of more than two centuries illustrates the genius of the American system of government.

The complex role of the Supreme Court in this system derives from its authority to invalidate legislation or executive actions which, in the Court’s considered judgment, conflict with the Constitution. This power of “judicial review” has given the Court a crucial responsibility in assuring individual rights, as well as in maintaining a “living Constitution” whose broad provisions are continually applied to complicated new situations.”

Question: If the right to privacy to make a personal medical choice, such as obtaining an abortion, is not explicitly provided in the Constitution, why was it not “invoked’ with the Roe v. Wade decision?

Question: Why was the Supreme Court able to invoke the power of judicial review for itself, when that power was not explicitly provided in the Constitution?

Quote from The Supreme Court’s official website, emphasis is mine.

“While the function of judicial review is not explicitly provided in the Constitution, it had been anticipated before the adoption of that document. Prior to 1789, state courts had already overturned legislative acts which conflicted with state constitutions. Moreover, many of the Founding Fathers expected the Supreme Court to assume this role in regard to the Constitution; Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, for example, had underlined the importance of judicial review in the Federalist Papers, which urged adoption of the Constitution.”

Despite this background the Court’s power of judicial review was not confirmed until 1803, when it was invoked by Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison. In this decision, the Chief Justice asserted that the Supreme Court’s responsibility to overturn unconstitutional legislation was a necessary consequence of its sworn duty to uphold the Constitution. That oath could not be fulfilled any other way. “It is emphatically the province of the judicial department to say what the law is,” he declared. In retrospect, it is evident that constitutional interpretation and application were made necessary by the very nature of the Constitution. The Founding Fathers had wisely worded that document in rather general terms leaving it open to future elaboration to meet changing conditions.”

Question: Isn’t overturning of Roe v. Wade creating “a crisis of human affairs?”

Quote from The Supreme Court’s official website, emphasis is mine.

“Chief Justice Marshall expressed the challenge which the Supreme Court faces in maintaining free government by noting: “We must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding . . . intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.”

Question: Why isn’t Roe v. Wade considered “settled law” and what has changed since all of the recent Supreme Court nominees stated it was “settled law” during their confirmation testimony.

Quote from The Supreme Court’s official website, emphasis is mine.

“When the Supreme Court rules on a constitutional issue, that judgment is virtually final; its decisions can be altered only by the rarely used procedure of constitutional amendment or by a new ruling of the Court. However, when the Court interprets a statute, new legislative action can be taken.”

BIG QUESTION NUMBER FIVE: FOR YOU TO ANSWER

Big Question Number Five: What do you think? Do you think Roe v. Wade should have been overturned? If not, what are you going to do about it

Bx: What do you think? Do you think Roe v. Wade should have been overturned? If not, what are you going to do about it?

Big Question Number Four:  Is the Supreme Court moving to reduce the rights (both civil and human) of individuals?

YES.  Both the ‘Hobby Lobby’ and ‘Citizen’s United’ decisions have already granted greater power and rights to corporations, larger groups, and organizations, reducing the political and economic power of the each person.

The rest of  my questions are directly to The Supreme Court, with statements (in quotes) taken directly from The Supreme Court’s official website: supremecourt.gov.

–Question:  Why is Roe v. Wade, a decision on a complicated situation in 1973, no longer a legitimate tool “assuring individual rights, as well as in maintaining a ‘living Constitution’ or providing the “balance between society’s need for order and the individual’s right to freedom?”

–Question:  How does overturning Roe v. Wade damage or weaken the “society’s need for order?” Quote from The Supreme Court’s official website, emphasis is mine. “The Constitution of the United States is a carefully balanced document. It is designed to provide for a national government sufficiently strong and flexible to meet the needs of the republic, yet sufficiently limited and just to protect the guaranteed rights of citizens; it permits a balance between society’s need for order and the individual’s right to freedom. To assure these ends, the Framers of the Constitution created three independent and coequal branches of government. That this Constitution has provided continuous democratic government through the periodic stresses of more than two centuries illustrates the genius of the American system of government.    The complex role of the Supreme Court in this system derives from its authority to invalidate legislation or executive actions which, in the Court’s considered judgment, conflict with the Constitution. This power of ‘judicial review’ has given the Court a crucial responsibility in assuring individual rights, as well as in maintaining a ‘living Constitution’ whose broad provisions are continually applied to complicated new situations.”

–Question:  If the right to privacy to make a personal medical choice, such as obtaining an abortion, is not explicitly provided in the Constitution, why was it not “invoked’ with the Roe v. Wade decision?

Question:  Why was the Supreme Court able to invoke the power of judicial review for itself, when that power was not explicitly provided in the Constitution? Quote from The Supreme Court’s official website, emphasis is mine. “While the function of judicial review is not explicitly provided in the Constitution, it had been anticipated before the adoption of that document. Prior to 1789, state courts had already overturned legislative acts which conflicted with state constitutions. Moreover, many of the Founding Fathers expected the Supreme Court to assume this role in regard to the Constitution; Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, for example, had underlined the importance of judicial review in the Federalist Papers, which urged adoption of the Constitution.”                                                         

Despite this background the Court’s power of judicial review was not confirmed until 1803, when it was invoked by Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison. In this decision, the Chief Justice asserted that the Supreme Court’s responsibility to overturn unconstitutional legislation was a necessary consequence of its sworn duty to uphold the Constitution. That oath could not be fulfilled any other way. “It is emphatically the province of the judicial department to say what the law is,” he declared. In retrospect, it is evident that constitutional interpretation and application were made necessary by the very nature of the Constitution. The Founding Fathers had wisely worded that document in rather general terms leaving it open to future elaboration to meet changing conditions.”

–Question:  Isn’t the overturning of Roe v. Wade creating “a crisis of human affairs?” Quote from The Supreme Court’s official website, emphasis is mine. “Chief Justice Marshall expressed the challenge which the Supreme Court faces in maintaining free government by noting: “We must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding . . . intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.”

–Question:  Why isn’t Roe v. Wade considered “settled law” and what has changed since all of the recent Supreme Court nominees stated it was “settled law” during their confirmation testimony. Quote from The Supreme Court’s official website, emphasis is mine. “When the Supreme Court rules on a constitutional issue, that judgment is virtually final; its decisions can be altered only by the rarely used procedure of constitutional amendment or by a new ruling of the Court. However, when the Court interprets a statute, new legislative action can be taken.”

Big Question Number Five:  What do you think?  Do you think Roe v. Wade should have been overturned?  If not, what are you going to do about it?

Big Question Number Three:  Does overturning Roe v. Wade harm our nation?                    YES.  It will weaken our constitutional rights, specified or unspecified.  Loss of rights to marry, or the freedoms of speech, the press, or assembly could lead to Autocracy, Fascism, or Dictatorship.  Overturning Row v. Wade builds on a pattern of the last several years: ignoring and destroying governmental norms and practices.  It will normalize rule breaking.  It will weaken laws.

Question: Do we need laws and government?

YES.  If we want to have roads to drive on, reliable cars to drive, safe food to eat, or other products we can buy rather than grow or create entirely for ourselves, we need the organization of government. We need it to enjoy publicly funded education or to have access to quality medical care and many other things that we enjoy (if not take for granted) here in the US.  Unless we’ve chosen to stay away from society totally, we are part of a social contract.  All nations, large or small are social contracts.  A governing model is created that allows people to function as individuals or small groups, while hiring government to handle large, society-wide processes.

State and county governments handle local roads, utilities, fire fighting, public education, accreditation for professions, construction standards for buildings, laws for behavior to protect individuals from victimization, danger, and recklessness, policing to enforce the laws, assistance to those who need it, and many other issues.  The federal government has officers, courts and agencies to provide for national security, health and safety, the administration of justice, large infrastructure projects, the creation of laws and bills for funding, and monetary policy to encourage a healthy economy.  While we could try to use the age-old barter system, it would be insufficient in today’s more complex world where we need to have money, policies, and regulations: we have to have a government. 

Question: Did abortion actually become a federal issue?                                             

YES.  It’s a long story.  The colonies and then the United States observed the English policies, recognizing that the before ‘quickening’ ending a pregnancy was an option to reduce family sizes and to not overburden the finances and stability of the household.  Though later not specified in our new nation’s written constitution, this policy was continuously followed for a century.  Many midwives and others offered herbal treatments.  There were laws; but ending a pregnancy after quickening was not a serious crime.                                                                                                                                         

The marketplace got into the abortion business with abortifacient advertising becoming highly effective in the United States.  Current estimates of mid-19th century abortion rates in the US show between 20% and 25% of all pregnancies in our nation were ended by abortions. Before the turn of the 19th century, most abortions were sought by single women impregnated out of wedlock. But reported in limited studies in American medical journals in the mid 1800s, over half of abortions were pursued by married women, and well over half of them already had one or more children.                         

Also in the marketplace, physicians who were the leading advocates of abortion criminalization laws, appear to have been motivated at least in part by advances in their medical knowledge. Science had discovered that conception started a basically continuous process of development, that when completed produced a new human being. Many physicians concluded that it was just as wrong to terminate a pregnancy before quickening as after quickening; The Hippocratic Oath and the medical mentality of that age to defend the value of human life shaped their opinions about abortion. But doctors had practical reasons to advocate for anti-abortion laws. Abortion providers tended to be medically untrained and not in medical societies; they were considered ‘irregulars’ by doctors wanting to standardize medical care. The more formalized medical providers disliked the competition of the less costly “irregulars.”                                                

States began to make abortions illegal. One reason given for such legislation was that abortions had been performed by dangerous methods including surgery. Though science and technology advanced and abortion methods had improved, most women still would resort to illegal unsafe methods, also known as “back alley” abortions. After the civil war, the blame for abortions was shifting to the developing women’s rights movement though many feminists of the time opposed abortion.

But in 1869, an anonymous feminist contributor wrote about the problem stating that attempting to pass a new law to ban abortions (as such a law didn’t exist at that time), would not be the solution; it would “be only mowing off the top of the noxious weed, while the root remains.”  Seduction or forcible sexual assault of unmarried women and marital rape were ills which feminists believed caused the need for abortions, as men did not recognize or respect women’s rights to remain virgins or to decline physical advances.  More socialist views among many feminists recognized further the need for abortion services among the very poor (and some even performed those services).                                                     

Physicians carried their anti-abortion agenda to state legislatures around the nation, pushing not only anti-abortion laws, but laws prohibiting birth control.  Then came the Comstock Law, which made it illegal to produce, publish, or distribute information pertaining to the procurement of abortion, abortion, or the prevention of conception or venereal disease, even for medical students, as such materials were obscene.  By 1900, abortion was a crime in every state. But some states allowed abortions in limited circumstances, usually to protect the woman’s life or to end pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.  Abortions continued to occur, however, and became increasingly available.                  

With medical and scientific advances, more reasons to allow for abortions were added in states: protecting the physical and mental health or well-being of the woman, the probability or certainty of abnormalities or deformities in the fetus, or detecting untreatable conditions that would render the fetus unable to sustain life outside womb.  But more and more reports of women’s injuries and deaths due to illegal abortions increased the nation’s calls for legalizing abortion.  Before Roe v. Wade, thirty states prohibited abortion with no exceptions, sixteen states banned abortion except in certain noted special circumstances, three states allowed their residents to obtain abortions, and New York allowed abortions to those who sought them.  With Roe v. Wade, abortion became a federal issue.                                                                                                             

Question:  Doesn’t the Fourth Amendment protect a person from unreasonable searches and seizures?                                                                                        

YES.  An individual cannot be seized, nor can his or her personal records or papers.   I would think that demanding medical records would be unreasonable search and seizure, and forcing a woman to surrender control of her body for several months (including the forced endurance of the physical, mentally tortuous, and dangerous delivery of a child she didn’t want to have) is a seizure of her being and her rights.  It is also a brutal punishment for committing no offense.

Question:  Is Roe v. Wade “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition?”

YES.  Looking at US demographic  data, 77% of Americans with uteruses are now or have been of child-bearing age during the half-century of Roe v. Wade.  And those who are younger (and their parents) have reasonably expectedthe same rights when they hit puberty. This is the history and tradition we all know.  It is deeply rooted in our society and in our rights to privacy.  None of us live in the eighteenth century.  Justice Alito feels that banning abortion is as “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition” as stockades, witch-burnings, and ‘scarlet letters.’ 

Question:  Will overturning Roe v. Wade reduce abortions?                                   

NOT MUCH.   While it will reduce the number of safe abortions, it will increase the number of unsafe, illegal procedures.  Women of moderate and higher financial circumstance will be able to travel to other states or countries that offer medically safe procedures to terminate a pregnancy.  Many poor women are impregnated.  Perhaps they can’t afford to add another child to their family, or to lose a scholarship, or to raise a child alone.  Others  can’t bear the trauma of giving birth to a child of rape or incest, but haven’t the means to secure a safe abortion.  Women carrying non-viable or non-living fetuses will be forced to face emotional pain, physical trauma, sepsis, and possible death or serious injury. The poor will be the seekers of cheap, illegal abortions; some will pay with their lives.

(See Question Number Four in next blog)

BIG Question Number Two:  Was overturning Roe v. Wade about conscience and religion?

YES. “Quickening,’ “ensoulment” or “animation,” are all terms describing the first sensations of movement of the fetus in utero. This movement is generally felt by women between the third and fifth month of pregnancy.  Pregnancy is a state of potential human life.  When or if humanness occurs during pregnancy, is a religious belief.                         

From a Jewish perspective from biblical times, the mother’s life is prioritized. Ending a pregnancy is considered more through a social lens than from a theological one. The woman’s personhood is recognized over that of the unborn.  The child’s personhood is recognized at birth. 

Currently, the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodoxy, Evangelical Protestant and some mainline Protestant churches oppose abortion in varying degrees. At the same time other mainline Protestant churches favor it, also in varying degrees, allowing the practice.  Of course that doesn’t mean all in their congregations hold entirely the same positions.  Support for abortion has increased in the US over the life of Roe v. Wade to seventy percent of Americans.                                     

Looking at 2020 data on Americans who have no opposition to abortion, finds that cohort includes 33% of Evangelical Christians, 53% of Historically Black Protestants, 48% of Catholics,  80% of Jews, 60% of Muslims, 80% of Hindus, 80% of Agnostics, and 87% of Atheists. Only 30% of Americans, if that, actually oppose abortion on religious grounds.                                                                                                                                     

Question:  Does it matter what I believe?                                                              

YES.  I believe for most people abortion is the lesser evil of two bad choices.  I also believe that our government (currently run mostly by men) should never require a woman to relinquish control of her own body.  If you don’t believe in abortion, don’t get one or pay for one.  But, you’re only in charge of your own life.                                                                 

Question:  If overturning Roe v. Wade is about religion and conscience, aren’t the First Amendment’s protections for religious freedom supposed to support a woman’s right to follow her own beliefs and conscience without interference or persecution?

YES.  But, for whatever their reasons, religious or political, some Supreme Court Justices (several of whom apparently lied to get their high court positions) are choosing to ignore, devalue or redefine these Bill of Rights protections                                      

Question:  Is the posed religious and moral overtones of the argument to overturn Row v. Wade in essence government establishment of religion?                          

YES.  Establishing a court or government-preferred belief structure also violates the First Amendment.  With a nation of many religions and an active conservative movement to  create minority rule, proffering a national statement of faith and morality to end the right to abortion is a power play.  The freedom to practice one’s own religion or lack thereof without interference or persecution means the right to learn, think, and have convictions. (Consider book banning a similar infringement.)  If a religious minority of the nation has the actual power to take away our rights, one by one, or all at once, only that minority will have rights.  Then that is called theocracy akin to the Taliban rule of Afghanistan.  If it is not actually a religious minority that enjoys all the power and rights it may be an autocracy, an oligarchy, a dictatorship, totalitarianism, or an aristocracy; but it won’t be a democracy.  (If it is truly a religious minority, they certainly would never use their rights, power and wealth to secure abortions for their daughters, wives, girlfriends, or mistresses now would they?)

(See Question Number Three in next blog)

I am a seventy-five year old mother of two daughters, and grandmother of one granddaughter. I have been the victim of inappropriate sexual behavior and predation within my family, as well as by neighbors and strangers; other members of my family have also been victims. I remember each and every event vividly to this day, still repeatedly questioning how I could have, or should have handled or avoided them better.  I will always have those questions.  I don’t want my granddaughter or my great-granddaughters-to-be to ever have those questions.  I never got pregnant from those types of events, but others have and still do, even granddaughters and great-granddaughters. 

I now have many questions and thoughts about whether we need Roe v. Wade or its equivalent.  I have lived through a period of American history that has granted more rights to the disenfranchised of our nation after long fought battles for equal rights.  Women, people of color, indigenous peoples, and members of the LGBTQ community have been grudgingly granted human and civil rights they have always deserved, after finally overcoming centuries-old and eternally unwarranted biases.  We, as a nation, have still not achieved full equality; but we’ve been moving closer to it.  With the overturning the half-century-old Roe v. Wade decision on abortion rights, (authored by Justice Alito) I want to know what has validly changed to make that ruling not longer settled law.  The right to end a pregnancy has been the law for two generations.  Since the end of slavery, we have never taken away rights in this nation. I have Five BIG Questions!

BIG Question Number One:  Is Roe v. Wade about power and rights?

YES. Some men, in and out of government, think they have the right to employ power at the expense of other people’s rights.

Question: Did we all hear Republican senators dismiss and attack a female college professor testifying that she was assaulted sexually and traumatized by Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who had already perjured himself in prior nomination hearings?  

YES. These senators also offered sentiments expressing ‘Boys will be boys.’ ‘Just young kids sowing their wild oats.’ ‘We’ve all been there.’ or ‘No harm, no foul.’ attitudes.  And, in solidarity, they supported his lies.  (Anyone, regardless of gender, who has been the victim of sexual predation knows there is harm; there is injury, and there is lasting trauma.)  These men didn’t care because they never were the victims.

Question: Did Justice Alito really cite Pleas of the Crown?  

YES. That’s the 1736 treatise (published six decades after author Sir Matthew Hale’s death) that defended and laid the foundation for the world-wide marital rape exemption.  Alito’s argument for ending Roe v. Wade included a citation from the man who literally had two women executed in a witch hunt.

Question: Are we still giving women less equality under our criminal laws?      YES. Leges Henrici Primi, a very early treatise of ‘laws’ in the reign of Henry I, written c. 1115, treated pre-quickening abortion as a misdemeanor, and post-quickening abortion as having lesser penalty than murder or homicide. After almost a thousand years, pregnant American women still have fewer rights over their own bodies. In spite of the fact that the rights of U.S. citizens regarding autonomy or sole sovereignty over their bodies (regardless of gender) are not specified in the constitution or its amendments, Federal and State governments and courts have taken the position that they have power and jurisdiction over only people who have uteruses and are of child-bearing age (pubescent girls, trans men, cis-gender women).  We are citizens, voters, and the majority of the nation’s population, yet we don’t have the same rights as cis-gender men.  The Ninth Amendment is interpreted to include natural rights into the Constitution suggesting that all of the most important freedoms might not have been listed.  Other amendments and laws have followed, but none specifically articulate that men have more rights than others.  And still Leges Henrici Primi  influences (with its current viability caveat) the Supreme Court.                                                                                                              Question: Did Congressman Matt Gaetz, known for bragging about his sexual conquests, with especially young women, really tweet this?                                           

YES. @mattgaetz · 11H

How many of the women rallying against overturning Roe are over-educated, under-loved millennials who sadly return from protests to a lonely microwave dinner with their cats, and no bumble matches?

Question:  Do American men like Matt Gaetz feel entitled to sovereignty over women’s bodies?                                                                                                                                

YES.  While millions of heterosexual American men enjoy mutual, loving relationships which include sexual intimacy, there are legions of men who were taught to feel entitled (by generations of entitled men) and to believe their sexual attention to any woman should make her feel blessed as opposed to used, abused or taken advantage of.  These men use alcohol, drugs, threats, gifts, or lies to gain entry into vaginas.  That is their only intent, except for the illusion of power it gives them and the actual power it rips away from their sexual partners (consenting or not).  In previous centuries men, stronger, larger, heavier, and, if necessary, meaner than the women and girls they’d subjugated, relied upon brute power when charm failed.                                                   

Now, in the year 2023, when generations of women have acquired more acumen, knowledge, skills, interests, and capabilities in addition to the ability to bear children, we have “Incels” who rage that women won’t give them the attention and sex they so sorely need and deserve.  Women have had to come from behind for centuries, finally earning comparable pay, professions, civil equality, and personal respect.  They have more life options than simply being a receptacle for semen.  They have every right to prefer caring, respectful men in their lives.  That must be really hard for men who think they are superior to women.  What better way to denigrate, devalue, and violate other humans than to simply be superior to them.  Power, it’s an old device and has worked for millennia.

(See next blog for Question Two)

What is the difference between reality, belief, and thought?

My reality is that:

• I was born into a society (or social contract) in the United States of America.
• The United States of America is a nation, one of hundreds of nations on a planet a finite land and sea mass, that is in orbit around our nearest star that we call the Sun.
• I am of the human species, one of millions of sets of living beings on this planet we call Earth.
• I have the ability to read and write in English, one of hundreds of languages used in our world.
• I think, learn, and love.  I have the ability to take action.
• I want to live a life that will make my grandchild proud.
• You share most, if not all of the above as your reality.

And there is much more to our shared reality.  But what is reality and what isn’t?  What is the difference between thought, belief, and reality?  

Reality, for the sake of this conversation, is the collection of things we call facts, or knowledge.  We know that seven times seven equals forty-nine (7×7=49), that Washington, D.C. is our nation’s capitol, that the nation of Canada is above our northern border, and that our fingers and toes get wrinkled up if we stay in the swimming pool or bathtub too long.  Some of what we call reality, or knowledge, is taught to us, with rules, formulas, proofs, and other data.  Some we learn through experience, like touching a hot stove s painful.  Some real facts will not change: like (7×7=49), you and I are humans, and we have the ability to take action.  But many real facts can change with the passage of time.  Nations can change borders or names. People’s actions can change the facts on the ground, as can nature, moving rivers or creating drought lands.  People’s actions, even yours or mine, can alter the paths of roads, change the congressmen in our districts, the number of people born, or the number of people killed in our cities.

Belief is the certainty of something independent of proof.  It may be central to one’s being.  Belief in God, Allah, Jesus, Heaven, Nirvana, Hell, prayer, miracles, Karma, etc., are all unable to be proved, demonstrated, or conclusively evidenced.  We may hold these things in our hearts as true, but not proven factual.  We may find them to be factual in a life after this one, if indeed there is one.

And thought is more ephemeral than belief.  What goes through my mind or yours is thought.  Some of it is totally random—“I wish I had some ice cream” or “Who would do that?” or “How do I get out of here?”    But thoughts aren’t reality.  They are just ideas flashing through our consciousness.  They can be reminders about something real we need to remember, they can be judgments about a reality we see (or we believe we see), they can be emotion-driven responses, they can be creative ideas, they can become obsessions if we keep revisiting them. Again, thoughts are not reality.

To an anorexic teenage girl, her thoughts may be “I am so fat” while in fact she is dangerously thin.  To a paranoid-schizophrenic, he may be certain there are people out to harm him, while in reality he has no enemies, haters, or threats.

While many of my thoughts and yours are helpful in facing daily life on this planet, many more are simply–thoughts.  A thought planted in us by constant repetition is still just a thought, not a fact.  “Tuesday is Red’s Tamale Day” is not a fact!  “You’re in Good Hands with Allstate” is not a fact, it is a sales pitch. A statement in itself is not a fact; speaking it doesn’t make it real nor does writing it.

It is a reality that many companies, individuals, and organizations constantly feed us all sales pitches.  It doesn’t necessarily mean the pitches are true and demonstrable.  And many of them are intended to sell us on believing them to be fact or reality.  Have you ever been conned into doing something, because you believed someone, without knowing all the facts?  I have.  Have you ever heard the phrase “too good to be true?” That adage was born out of painful experience. We live in a marketplace where something is always being sold to us.

Sometimes what is being fed to us is to manipulate us.  This is called propaganda.  Used by individuals and large entities, it is also called lies or “gaslighting.” And often these falsehoods are linked to things we already know or want to believe are factual.

Maybe I’ve just become conservative or a bit wary because of the traps I’ve fallen into in my 74 years, but I‘ve learned to trust facts and reality.  I  have belief (but not because of many religious proponents having pitched me many times).  And I have many thoughts, but I rarely act on the ones about which I can’t find legitimate facts, or don’t have personal knowledge and experience.  We must find a way to own our own thoughts and ideas and not let others define them.

I have been away from this site for over two years after starting it.  Life threw me a curve with so many startling, upsetting events I lost my footing on my goal in this Blog.  My sister suddenly needed hospice care and I provided that until her death.  Then a global pandemic struck and I went into a shutdown.  I was already disturbed by the path my nation (the US) was on. As a white woman in my seventies I was appalled that the arc of history and our movement toward a more humane, united nation have been so damaged.  

I am one of many who have been more than distressed that the man who was our President, was by his words and actions, encouraging resurgence of the angry, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, sexist, and generally hateful fear-rage in much of white citizenry.  This wasn’t a partisan or policy divide. This was  a civil and social divide.  This man said “If you’re like me you’re one of us; if you’re not like me you’re the others.” What are we to do?

While this now ex-president still only cares about himself, he found and pressed the buttons of resentment that lie in the troubled hearts of his supporters.  He uses fear of receiving his ugly retribution against his Washington aides and abettors.  He uses fear against his white supporters, who are afraid of the fact that in reality they aren’t superior to any other humans, that they aren’t actually entitled to more respect, special treatment or advantages, and the truth is that being born white doesn’t come with a badge honor. 

I have learned that life isn’t fair, but that we can work to make it as fair as possible in our society.  While we can’t control our history, our places of birth or our genetics, we can change our behavior for it is what we do in this life that is the measure of our worth.  

We can choose to learn about the unknowns in our lives;  the people who are not just like us, the cultures that are not just like ours, the religions that are not ours, even the food and languages that are not ours.  When we learn even a little of these people, cultures, religions, foods and languages, we can see that we all are more alike than different.  The ‘others” are not wrong or bad. 

We must reach out and discover that the VAST majority of people on this planet want better lives now and for our children in the future, a safe healthy planet, and a more just world.  We must join together to fight the few that want only profit and power today, not for all of us, but only for themselves (and at the expense of our health, well-being and futures.

I want to save the future for all of our children and grandchildren.  I want to discover what I can do to work toward that end.  I think you may want the same thing, and I hope you will join me in this effort.

Trying to strike up a conversation with someone in person is difficult; but doing so online feels even riskier.  “So, did you watch the game last night” is pretty lame since I don’t know where you are, and if you even like to watch games.  But I feel a need to reach out to you, because so many ugly things are happening, and I feel there is a great need for finding common ground.  Here in the US and around the world we are bombarded with confusing, and often upsetting volleys of mixed facts, opinions, lies, and inaccurate or incomplete information.

I believe we may have common ground in regard to lives and futures of our grandchildren.  We want the best for them; but I know I can’t remove them to an idyllic location and protect them from what we’re all facing.  There is no escaping with them.  No matter where we are, we’ve all been born into a ‘civilized’ society; a social contract.  OK, now I’m going a bit ‘teacherly’ here.

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A social contract or political contract is an agreement between the people of a state and the government of a state. The people agree to follow certain rules made by the government. These rules are usually called laws. Laws help to make sure people have rights and that their rights are protected. One kind of social contract is a constitution. A constitution says how decisions are made and sets limits on the powers of leaders and other people who have authority.
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Of course we’re likely to think of state and federal laws, but there are lots of social contracts.  Are you the member of a lodge?  A church? The Marines? The PTA? A book club? Most of us are a part of numerous agreements or affiliations.  In addition to our obligations to adhere to laws, we often are expected to adhere to norms, behaviors, and even attitudes.  Organizations and affiliations are not bad; they are great ways to spend time and energy doing things for a common purpose or enjoying common interests.

I know it is easier for me to stay with the activities and folks I’m comfortable with, but in this blog, I’m trying to grow and learn, and maybe take baby steps toward doing something that will broaden my horizons and perspective.

I know that I have inherited some attitudes and habits from my family, my childhood, and my youth; and some of them are not very nice.  (Like frequent uncontrollable swearing, interrupting, and spontaneous hugging.)  And I’m certain I need attitude adjustments, probably many.

But what we receive from society, through our various contracts, formal or informal, can continue to grow, adjust, and mature.  And I want to grow.  I want us all to grow by taking on new experiences.  Up to now, I’ve always been motivated to action by either fear or guilt.  There’ll be plenty more about fear and guilt in future blogs I am sure, but today I’m motivated to meet new people, eat new foods, go to different places, and learn new things about this world.  And maybe do some things that will help make a better world for our grandchildren and their children.

I hope you’ll join me, with ideas, questions, and a willingness to try something different.