Bigger than Roe v. Wade

A thread I saw on Twitter this morning has stuck with me all day. Its writer, @vaspider, points out that the recent Texas 6-week abortion ban and bounty legislation are perhaps more importantly an attack on the right to privacy, which is what Roe v. Wade was about, from a legal perspective.

The main argument of Roe v. Wade hinged on the right to privacy under the 4th amendment, namely the idea that a private individual has the right to engage in such medical decisions as they see fit without the state getting involved. 

It also hinged on the 14th Amendment's 'due process' clause. So basically, the idea here is that without 'due process,' you cannot be deprived of your liberty to make medical decisions for yourself, nor can you be deprived of your right to privacy about those decisions.

They then go on to list other Supreme Court decisions that were based on a right to privacy, and the aspects of life those decisions affect, such as contraception (first for married couples then for individuals), sodomy laws, and marriage of same-sex people (since that's based in part on same-sex people having sex, i.e. sodomy). 

Not only do I think that this is a very deliberate target of this entire attack on our very literal freedom to decide how we live our lives and what we want to do with our bodies, who we love, etc., but I think the cases to challenge these decisions are already being set up....

If the Supreme Court finds that the state's interest vis a vis Roe v. Wade falls the other way now -- that the state's interest IS in regulating private medical decisions -- then it can easily find that the state can regulate personal sexual decisions.

And we're not just talking about abortion when we talk about personal medical decisions. We're talking about the right to medical transition, both HRT and surgical intervention. We're talking about the right of disabled people to not be forcibly sterilized by the state.

We're talking about the right to not be experimented upon without our consent, or the right to not have 'practice' pelvic exams done on us by medical students while we're asleep for surgery, or the right to end our own lives if we so choose.

If you're thinking that no dude out there right now is thinking 'but what if we could establish the legal right to experiment on prisoners again and give them new drugs though?' then you are far less cynical than I am, just saying.

As the writer says a couple of times in the thread, yes, this all sounds paranoid. But after the past five years and with this Supreme Court... how much do you want to bet on that?

There's a lot more, plus links, in the original thread.