The SupCo just greenlit a massive expansion of the carcereal state (and possibly civil war)
It's going to be worse than pre-Roe v. Wade, because unlike during the 1950s, America imprisons more people than anywhere in the world.
I don’t know whose fault this is, but abortion is often portrayed in one of two ways a) the right of middle-class women to delay childbearing until they’re been to college and are secure in their profession and self-fulfilled in their own lives until bringing new life into the world. When poor women come into the equation the image that’s usually conjured up is the struggling mother juggling multiple jobs and the needs of multiple children.
Pre-Roe world, meanwhile, is depicted as poor and well-off women both at risk of dying from a dirty coat hanger (though obviously wealthy women had safer options). As my friend reporter Justin Elliott reported more than a decade ago, a close relative of Mitt Romney’s died in a back-alley abortion.
Anyway, I feel like these are the tropes most people think of when it comes to freedom of choice. It’s valid to delay motherhood until you want to be a mother (or mother a second or third child) But one can see that a reasonably compassionate person, if they’re concerned that a fetus might feel pain, etc, would make a moral calculation that a career or financial stability and the self-actualization and professional success of college-educated women are worth taking the chance.
Both of those are important, but barely scratch the surface. They’d apply in any Western country, even though, obviously, both scenarios are significantly alleviated with a solid social safety net for parents. But this is not any Western country. It’s an insane place that imprisons more people than China and Russia. That uses any reason to shuffle as many poor people as possible into prisons and jails. And the Supreme Court just greenlit an expansion of the police and carceral state with horrifying potential consequences.
Think about all the ways this is likely to amplify that horrors in some of the most dysfunctional and inhumane institutions in America?
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