I am still so furious about the corrupt Supreme Court’s striking down of Roe v. Wade the other day that I can barely think straight. The reason I’m so angry is not because of abortion specifically but because this SCOTUS decision was a major erosion of women’s rights and women’s health care and women’s autonomy. They took away a Constitutional right from half of the US population. A lot of bad things are going to come down from the court after this decision.

All my life I have fought for women’s rights and believed we need a lot more of them, but they have gradually slipped away in the last few years. For much of that I blame the Republicans and Trump.  But I also blame Democrats. Today I found out that we can actually blame many Democrats from the 1990s and after, for this Roe v. Wade mess. Democrats had a bill to codify Roe in 1993, and it didn’t pass largely because of Democrats blowing it up and then destroying it, nitpicking and squabbling it to death. President Clinton was ready to sign it, but Democrats stopped it cold. Why? A variety of selfish reasons.

Gloria Steinem in 1981, at an ERA demonstration

It was largely Republicans that blocked the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment which was first introduced in 1923.  The ERA finally passed the House and Senate in the 1970s, but failed to be ratified by all the states needed (38) until 2020, when Virginia finally ratified it. But by then, “… experts and advocates have acknowledged legal uncertainty about the consequences of the Virginian ratification, due to expired deadlines and five states’ revocations.”  You could blame that failure to pass on Republicans, in part, but Democrats dropped the ball on the ERA too. More on the ERA efforts here.

If only we had the ERA in effect this week, the destruction of Roe v. Wade would never have been possible. I also get a feeling that the feminists of the 1970s would never have allowed Donald Trump to be president, or for the Supreme Court to become so corrupt.

But now the corrupt, politically extremist and dishonest majority on the Supreme Court has destroyed women’s rights in this country. We no longer have autonomy or control over our own bodies. It’s a ridiculous situation for us to be in, in 2022, when we know that throughout our history abortion was common and legal. Ben Franklin himself put a recipe for abortion tea in a school textbook! Pilgrims practiced abortion! It was common in the 1800s! But it’s just too much for the puritanical Republicans to accept, as they are run by big money, the NRA, and the Evangelical extremists and other religious cults.

I really wanted to just post this article from USA Today, instead of dwelling on the loss of my civil and constitutional rights today, or dwell on what this all means for other rights, so that we can all examine who needs to be blamed for this mess. We do need to blame the Democrats too, as they are sometimes a corrupt organization, especially when it comes to fundraising. Today fundraising emails went out, claiming to be from the DNC and President Biden himself, that said you should send them money so they can fight for our rights! This story was told on MSNBC today by two young women. To which the only rational response can be, “Are they FUCKING KIDDING US?!”

Democrats can go to hell, as much as Republicans should, for fundraising over losing the very same women’s rights that they should have been protecting all this time, and simple refused to do so.  Read the article from USA Today below for more of an explanation, or read it on their website.

Why was Roe v. Wade never codified in Congress? Democrats since Clinton ‘kind of dropped it’

There was a sense that passing abortion rights into law wasn’t necessary, and Democrats didn’t have the votes, even in their own party.