But Alito’s draft opinion nevertheless represents about as odiously maximalist an approach as the court could have taken. In a way, the leaked opinion didn’t tell us anything we did not already know: these are the last days of reproductive freedom in America, and most states will soon ban abortion outright, or restrict it so onerously that it is inaccessible within their borders. It was a joke, a festival of misogyny, an unserious legal formality providing a gossamer of legitimacy for a preordained outcome. Kavanaugh rattled off long lists all the decisions that the court had overturned in the past. The hearing, whose audio was live-streamed to the public, turned into a carnival of delusional hypotheticals and nodding insistence on the triviality of precedent.Īmy Coney Barrett asked why women needed abortion, now that “safe haven” laws allowed for new mothers to surrender newborns without being arrested.
Feminists, meanwhile, were more consistent in measuring the depth of the right’s commitment to sexism and more perceptive in understanding the implications for other areas of the law in a world without Roe.īut after oral arguments on 1 December, even those pundits who were most committed to their performance of sophisticated calm had to admit that there was little doubt that this would be the outcome.
