In the weeks since a draft of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization…was leaked, a slogan has been revived: “We won’t go back.” It has been chanted at marches, defiantly but also somewhat awkwardly, given that this is plainly an era of repression and regression, in which abortion rights are not the only rights disappearing. Now that the Supreme Court has issued its final decision, overturning Roe v. Wade and removing the constitutional right to abortion, insuring that abortion will become illegal or highly restricted in twenty states, the slogan sounds almost divorced from reality—an indication, perhaps, of how difficult it has become to comprehend the power and right-wing extremity of the current Supreme Court.
Support for abortion has never been higher, with more than two-thirds of Americans in favor of retaining Roe, and fifty-seven per cent affirming a woman’s right to abortion for any reason. Even so, there are Republican officials who have made it clear that they will attempt to pass a federal ban on abortion if and when they control both chambers of Congress and the Presidency. Anyone who can get pregnant must now face the reality that half of the country is in the hands of legislators who believe that your personhood and autonomy are conditional—who believe that, if you are impregnated by another person, under any circumstance, you have a legal and moral duty to undergo pregnancy, delivery, and, in all likelihood, two decades or more of caregiving, no matter the permanent and potentially devastating consequences for your body, your heart, your mind, your family, your ability to put food on the table, your plans, your aspirations, your life.
Another solid article. Well researched, if not definitive, on alternatives, choice and, unfortunately, considering the penalties enacted by a backwards society upon those who dissent in word and deed. And, yes, leading to the courage and conviction to fightback – as must we all!
Eideard 
The conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court has chipped away at the wall separating church and state in a series of new rulings, eroding American legal traditions intended to prevent government officials from promoting any particular faith.
In three decisions in the past eight weeks, the court has ruled against government officials whose policies and actions were taken to avoid violating the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment prohibition on governmental endorsement of religion – known as the “establishment clause.” https://news.yahoo.com/u-supreme-court-takes-aim-100830562.html
As much as I want to have hope for my future, I’m officially admitting that I am pessimistic.
“In an opinion concurring with his conservative colleagues on the Supreme Court to overturn the fundamental right to an abortion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote on Friday that striking down Roe v. Wade should also open up the high court to review other precedents that may be deemed “demonstrably erroneous.”
Among those, Thomas wrote, was the right for married couples to buy and use contraception without government restriction, from the landmark 1965 ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/24/contraception-supreme-court-clarence-thomas-griswold/
“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote on Page 119 of the opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, also referring to the rulings that legalized same-sex relationships and marriage equality, respectively. “Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous’ … we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”
“Several national antiabortion groups and their allies in Republican-led state legislatures are advancing plans to stop people in states where abortion is banned from seeking the procedure elsewhere, according to people involved in the discussions.
…The Thomas More Society, a conservative legal organization, is drafting model legislation for state lawmakers that would allow private citizens to sue anyone who helps a resident of a state that has banned abortion from terminating a pregnancy outside of that state. The draft language will borrow from the novel legal strategy behind a Texas abortion ban enacted last year in which private citizens were empowered to enforce the law through civil litigation.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/29/abortion-state-lines/
In other words, you’re free to move about and live your life … as long as it’s approved by some pipsqueak in Old Testament garb.
Re: Free and Slave states
Interactive map shows where abortion bans are in effect and where doctors face prison time https://abcnews.go.com/US/interactive-map-shows-abortion-bans-effect-doctors-face/story?id=85881916
Timeline of women’s legal rights in the United States (other than voting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women%27s_legal_rights_in_the_United_States_(other_than_voting)
See also U.S. Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850
Does Hungary Offer a Glimpse of Our Authoritarian Future?
American conservatives recently hosted their flagship conference in Hungary, a country that experts call an autocracy. Its leader, Viktor Orbán, provides a potential model of what a Trump after Trump might look like. (The New Yorker 6/27/22)
New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/04/does-hungary-offer-a-glimpse-of-our-authoritarian-future