Catholic school nuns posited this scenario to boys in school. If a doctor told you he could save the life of your wife or an unborn baby which would you choose? Now what if the baby is a boy? The message was clear. Women are for making boy babies.

For the purpose of representation in Congress slaves were considered three fifths of a man. African women were animals for breeding. 

There was no need to count women for representation, about one half the population of the United States:

Unmentioned but understood was women were considered animals for breeding. 

“The court has for a long, long time said: Look, if we define liberty only in terms of what was permitted at the time of ratification of the Bill of Rights or the 14th Amendment, then we’re stuck in time,” said Scott Skinner-Thompson, an associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Because in the 18th and 19th centuries, this country was not very free for many, many people — particularly women, particularly people of color.”

Although Thomas’s concurring opinion did not mention it, the ruling could even imperil the right to interracial marriage, which the Supreme Court recognized in its 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia, Skinner-Thompson said. (Thomas, who is Black, is married to a White woman.)

Thomas’s “potential retort would be that that violates the Equal Protection clause, because it’s race-based discrimination,” Skinner-Thompson said. “The problem is that if you take the originalists’ interpretation at face value and say: ‘What were the practices of this country at the time of the ratification of the 14th Amendment after the Civil War?’ Guess what? There was race discrimination all over the place. Separate but equal — it continued apace for over a century.”

"The question is not, and has never been, when or whether a fetus counts as a person. The question is if women do. And the answer, clearly, is no. We do not."

MORE AT:

"Women are not considered human beings in America | PennLive letters"

***

“I think this is a perfect decision for the 18th century,” Rosalie Abella, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School who retired last summer from the Supreme Court of Canada, told the Globe and Mail on Friday. In her interview with the Canadian newspaper, the former justice likened the new ruling to other infamous Supreme Court verdicts that deprived Americans of fundamental rights — such as Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857, which said Americans of African descent could never become citizens.

“That to me is as inconceivable as what they did today,” Abella said. “And yet they did it. It’s a frightening precedent, and delegitimizes the integrity of a court.…”

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court is now in the spotlight. The court’s weaponization by the American right is the end goal of decades of concerted effort and campaigning. “The conservative movement’s control of the Supreme Court, its success in skewing the electoral process through voting restrictions and gerrymandering, and the Democrats’ likely collapse in the coming midterms have bolstered Republicans’ confidence that they can drastically reshape American society on their terms without losing power,” wrote the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer.

It is clear now, Serwer added, that “the Supreme Court has become an institution whose primary role is to force a right-wing vision of American society on the rest of the country.”

In that regard, the United States finds itself in rather unflattering company. Analysts point to Poland, whose illiberal nationalist ruling party has spent years re-engineering the judiciary in its favor, much to the consternation of the European Union leadership in Brussels. Last year, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal issued a ruling that made abortion, or abetting an abortion, a criminal act, with exceptions only for rape, incest and to protect the mother’s life.

Some Poles, like many Americans, saw its determination as an ideological act. “Many people in both countries perceive judicial institutions to be politicized,” said Courtney Blackington, an American Fulbright scholar affiliated with the Polish Academy of Sciences and the University of Warsaw, to The Post’s Retropolis blog. “When the new abortion ruling came out last year, there were activists who told me that they could not respect it because they felt it emanated from an institution that no longer respected the law.”

MORE AT:

The Supreme Court turns the U.S. into a cautionary tale

Ishaan Tharoor

Analysis by Ishaan Tharoor

Columnist

June 27, 2022 at 12:01 a.m. EDT

Two topics: how to combat the Supreme Court revoking women's rights; how to hold Trump accountable:

Glenn Kirschner

Why Are Millions of Citizens Not Registered to Vote?