Alito’s draft opinion is correct on two points: The historical section of Roe is a mess; it says nothing about slavery, let alone controlled reproduction as intrinsic to it. And, indeed, state laws criminalizing abortion were initiated in the nineteenth century, before and after the Civil War. What Alito omits is that no woman had a say in those state laws. No man in a position to make or enforce those laws would have been thinking about black women’s experience of reproductive tyranny—just as subsequent white advocates of population control (eugenics, even contraception) would not have been More
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by JoAnn Wypijewski.