Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the group that argued against the abortion pill before the Supreme Court on Tuesday, does not hide that its goal goes well beyond ending access to abortion, as they successfully overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Alan Sears, the head of ADF, explained as much to David Kirkpatrick of the New Yorker last year, arguing that "the birth control pill was a mistake" and expressing a belief that his group could destroy access to the pill. It was yet another reminder that ADF and their Republican allies aren't "pro-life," but simply misogynists who wish to roll back decades of women's progress.
But they also know that's a bad look. So during Tuesday's Supreme Court arguments over the legality of the abortion pill, ADF used a favorite Republican trick to conceal misogynist intent: Have a lady say it. Erin Hawley was tapped to play the role of the snarling church lady pretending to "protect" the naughty sex-havers from having a say over their own bodies. Yep, that's the wife of Sen. Josh "Hauling A**" Hawley, R-Mo., infamous for cheering on Jan. 6 rioters before fleeing for his life after the insurrectionists breached the barricades around the Capitol.
Hawley openly acknowledged in court that abortion bans are causing serious harm by keeping women physically distant from trusted doctors.
Erin Hawley is the latest in a long line of Republican women who have built successful careers by destroying the lives of other women. Hawley has been incredibly lucky in life, graduating from Yale Law and clerking at the Supreme Court. She is now using that impressive resume to deny the same opportunities to other women. She was part of the legal team that successfully argued to repeal Roe v. Wade, for example, allowing her home state of Missouri to undermine the futures of countless girls and women through forced childbirth. Tuesday, she took the fight even more national, pretending to believe abortion pills cause "harm." Her proposed remedy to this imaginary problem: more forced pregnancy and childbirth, processes she and the conservative judges pretended are a pain-free experience for all those who endure it.
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As usual with anti-choicers, Hawley's bad faith is breathtaking in its audacity. She loves to wax poetic in public about how she wants a culture "that values women’s lives." In court she argued against letting women have a safe, effective drug whose entire purpose is making the process of abortion less painful and dangerous. But truthfully, even she struggled to keep up the act of "caring" about women during arguments. Instead, most of her time was spent in maudlin complaint about anti-abortion doctors who were afraid that, one day, they may have a patient show up at an emergency room with an incomplete abortion. To prevent this hypothetical situation, she argued, it was important to ignore decades of research showing these drugs are safe and ban the FDA from allowing doctors to prescribe the pills for at-home use.
Every word of her argument was disingenuous. The actual reason ADF wants to restrict access to abortion pills is for the same reason they oppose contraception and same-sex marriage rights: They are theocrats who want to end secular law and impose a far-right Christian nationalist agenda on all Americans. In the original brief Hawley wrote for Tuesday's case, she and the other ADF lawyers argued for a revival of the 1873 Comstock Act, a long-dormant (but never repealed) law that would make it a crime not only to ship abortion pills anywhere in the country, but, as written, would criminalize shipping contraception, or even just information about preventing pregnancy.
Justice Clarence Thomas, who has previously called for a chance for the Supreme Court to overturn legal birth control, joined Justice Samuel Alito during oral arguments in suggesting the government should enforce Comstock again. Someone should tell him the law would also criminalize the film catalog of "Long Dong Silver," who, according to the impeccably persuasive Anita Hill, built up an oeuvre that Thomas was loudly and openly impressed by.
In one especially chilling moment, Hawley argued that more women were seeking aftercare for abortions at emergency rooms instead of from the doctor who provided the abortion, raising the (still extremely slim) chances her clients might be asked to help a patient post-abortion. What she failed to mention is that she, personally, is largely to blame for this shift. She was part of the legal team that obtained the Dobbs decision that allowed states to ban abortion. This forced thousands of women to seek abortion from out-of-state providers. If those women return home and experience symptoms that concern them, they can't just go to the far-away doctor who first gave them the pills, but now have to go to the emergency room instead.
The moment seemed to pass unnoticed in all the legalese, but it told the whole story of what a deeply dishonest actor Hawley is. She openly acknowledged in court that abortion bans are causing serious harm by keeping women physically distant from trusted doctors. And it's not hard to see how this problem will be compounded if women are denied even more access to doctors who can provide safe abortion care. The number of post-abortion emergency room visits will soar if women start taking pills without any medical supervision — or worse, if they are forced to resort to pre-Roe methods like the wirehanger or throwing themselves down stairs.
Not, of course, that Hawley or any of her allies care if women are harmed or killed. On the contrary, the entire point of banning abortion is to inflict harm on women, as punishment for rejecting fundamentalist beliefs sex is only for procreation. Hawley herself stands to personally benefit from all the pain she's deliberately causing other women. Whether she wins or loses this particular case (and early signs suggest a majority of justices aren't ready to go there), she's raking in that right wing cash and burnishing her resume by arguing in front of the high court. She will have even more opportunities to be the smiling female face plastered over Christian right misogyny. All for the low cost of selling out the rest of American women who just want to be left alone to make their own decisions.
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