Born 45 years into the 20th century, I missed the 1857 Dred Scott decision (Dred Scott v. Stanford). It denied blacks, whether slave or free, the right to citizenship, leaving them incapable of suing for their freedom or anything else. It protected slave holders rights under the Fifth Amendment, declaring slaves to be their property. Lastly, it ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, ending the ability of the federal government to prevent the spread of slavery.
I could never imagine I’d live to experience a Supreme Court decision that could rank with Dred Scott.
But one hundred, sixty-eight years, 111 days later, the Supreme Court struck down Roe V. Wade, after 49 years of granting women the Constitutional right to privacy on reproductive health. The decision is an astonishing betrayal of Supreme Court precedent, which makes reversal rare and only in the most urgent cases of public interest. Such an example was Brown V. Board of Education, which struck down the grotesque ruling legitimizing ‘separate but equal’, institutionalizing second class citizenship for blacks, 58 years earlier.
America is now condemned to become hopelessly divided on the right to privacy with over 33 million women of childbearing age, likely to face draconian choices in receiving the most basic right they have enjoyed for nearly half a century. Instead of the decision righting an egregious wrong, it institutionalizes an egregious wrong on every one of those women; indeed it’s an affront to every American who values their privacy on personal matters that do no harm whatsoever to society.
The decision will mainly effect poor people, especially people of color, trapped in likely 26 states who have little or no means to travel to a sane state such as Illinois for a basic medical procedure, the right to which every human being deserves.
Was the ghost of disgraced Roger Taney, the Chief Justice who sheparded the 7 -2 Dred Scott decision, hovering over Alito, Thomas, Barrett, Gorsuch and Cavanaugh as they placed the stamp of disgrace and ignominy on the Supreme Court, possibly forever?
But Karma may be unleashed upon the decision’s authors and the legislators salivating to upend the basic principles of freedom and privacy upon which this nation must rest. The Dred Scott decision helped ignite the simmering abolitionist movement which began our nation’s march to end slavery. So too, the 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade must spur the forces championing the rule of law over the rule of 5 persons who abrogated their sacred duty, to organize for re-instatement of privacy, including full abortion rights, nationwide.
Every woman, every American, deserves nothing less.
