Of Course, They’re Coming For Your Birth Control
What the Right’s opposition to abortion, immigration, and contraception all have in common
When the draft of Justice Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health was leaked two weeks ago, many commentators noted that its reasoning might also support attacks on other rights. Though Alito takes pains to distinguish abortion, Roe was part of a long line of cases that interpreted the liberty interest of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process clause as entailing a right to privacy and bodily autonomy. Thus, if Roe is held to have been wrongly decided, critics worry that cases like Lawrence v. Texas (overturning state laws criminalizing gay sex) and Griswold v. Connecticut (overturning state bans on contraception) might also be in jeopardy.
And they are right to worry. Though most of us probably associate the anti-abortion movement with religious conservatives, it also has troubling historical ties to white supremacists. As organized religion in America continues to decline under the weight of moral scandals and political overreach, the relative importance of white supremacists to the anti-abortion movement has grown. For these individuals, restricting abortion is just one part of a multi-pronged strategy for combating what is known in alt-right circles as “The Great…
