https://newsletterwithecm.substack.com/p/dear-joe?s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Hey there, Mr. President. Forgive the informality. In an earlier version of this letter, the honorifics left me with a sense that it wasn’t ok to speak my mind to you, and after all, you are the president and I am your constituent, and we should be able to talk candidly. Hello.

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We have seen the GOP and their base of white supremacists invade and destroy the Capitol in an attempt to steal the election days before your inauguration, and then we’ve sat here, for almost eighteen months so far, as the Department of Justice fails to indict a single primary organizer of those events despite the deepest, most incendiary actions tracking all the way into the Oval Office of your predecessor.

We have seen the GOP smash our voting rights state by state, gerrymandering districts beyond recognition and decimating one of our most important rights, while the Democratic party sits back and says, oh well, too bad so sad, Freedom to Vote Act, the filibuster is more important than you are.

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And now, we have read a draft opinion from one of those same justices, supported by four more of them who plainly lied during their confirmation hearings, that will destroy the bodily autonomy of more than half the people in this country, and we have watched in response as the Democratic party, and you, have engaged in performative gestures of support while doing nothing, literally nothing, to try to preserve our rights and save our lives, and while a member of our own party claims the filibuster as his protection and thereby sentences pregnant people in America to forced birth and preventable death.

Despite all this, you seem to think that we are the ones who will have to do more, yet again, come November.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/05/the-alarming-implications-of-alitos-domestic-supply-of-infants-footnote.html

One of the most arresting lines in Justice Samuel Alito’s 98-page draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade is a footnote that didn’t really surface until the weekend. A throwaway footnote on Page 34 of the draft cites data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that in 2002, nearly 1 million women were seeking to adopt children, “whereas the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted has become virtually nonexistent.” In response to the outrage and some misinformation, the conservative legal industrial complex went to great lengths to downplay it as a trivial footnote in a draft opinion, and to insist that Alito was citing the CDC and not himself and that the note appears in a roundup of “people are saying”–type arguments against abortion.

True. But the footnote reflects something profoundly wrong with the new “ethos of care” arguments advanced by Republicans who want to emphasize compassion instead of cruelty after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health fallout. Footnote 46, quantifying the supply/demand mismatch of babies, follows directly on another footnote in the opinion approvingly citing the “logic” raised at oral argument in December by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who mused that there is no meaningful hardship in conscripting women to remain pregnant and deliver babies in 2022 because “safe haven” laws allow them to drop those unwanted babies off at the fire station for other parents to adopt.

Second only to the creeping chatter of state birth control bans, the speedy pivot to celebrating forced birth and adoption is chilling. It’s chilling not just because it discounts the extortionate emotional and financial costs of childbirth and the increased medical risks of forced childbirth. It’s chilling because it lifts us out of a discussion about privacy and bodily autonomy and into a regime in which babies are a commodity and pregnant people are vessels in which to incubate them. If this sounds like a familiar, albeit noxious, economic concept, it’s because it is.