The toes, the clothes and, oh, the smell of a newborn.

Babies are cute, which is exactly what makes babies such powerful political forces, and abortion such a divisive issue.

But of course abortion isn’t really about the babies, is it? Because we have enough babies living without health care, starving, stuck in foster care without

prospects of

adoption. Few anti-abortion people spend their weekends protesting that reality.

are abortion restrictions

about power, especially dominance over black and brown women. And even tilting

Roe v. Wade Roe v. Wade

last summer that didn’t drive home

kinda like that

much like

Fridays

ruling of an ultra-conservative judge in Texas

whose court order, if in effect, would prevent access to it

the safest and most commonly used drug for chemical abortions

towards the end of

this week.

“Misogyny among certain parts of our culture knows no bounds,” says Senator Nancy Skinner,

a Berkeley Democrat

and head of the

Caucus for California Legislative Women

told me.

I can’t argue. We are, as she put it,

in a dark time

where misogyny is “treacherous and anchored in morality.”

That ruling in Texas is now the subject of intense politics

and legal

maneuvering that in the coming days could accelerate an appeal to the majority anti-abortion Supreme Court. At issue is the alleged risk of a drug called mifepristone used in combination with a second drug for more than half of the

chemical

all abortions in the US

Despite the alleged concerns of federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who in his ruling eschews the term fetus in favor of “unborn

humane

and “unborn child,”

mifepristone

has been used for over 22 years and is considered by medical providers to be so effective and safe that women can use it in the privacy of their own home until about the 10th week of pregnancy.

What’s the point.

This statement is not about safety. It’s about taking away privacy from abortions and forcing women into the public eye where they can be monitored and controlled.

Since

Roe v. Wade Roe v. Wade

was overturned, abortion is banned in 13 states, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive and sexual health think tank. Two other states have near-bans, creating a bloc of Southern states where women have no recourse, often not even in cases of rape or incest.

Guttmacher also reports that in the first few months since Roe was

overturned

At least 66 clinics in 15 states closed or stopped performing abortions, leaving nearly 30% of women

of reproductive age

in the US with limited opportunities to obtain one.

Chemical abortion, in some cases with mail delivery of the medication, was a life saver.

A chemical abortion can still be safely induced with just the second drug, misoprostol. But that one-drug regimen isn’t as effective

(though still very effective)

and can lead to more cramps. Simply put, it works, but it’s not the gold standard of the two-drug option.

Because it is slightly less effective and can cause more pain, it could lead more women to seek medical attention.

other

since some hospitals

in states with an abortion ban

Even refusing care for miscarriages can pose a deadly threat to a complication.

Forcing women

in a less effective and possibly more public and dangerous method

of medication abortion

is an atrocity meant to frighten women and make them fear the consequences.

“This kind of confusion and fear is not only clear that it’s going to be nearly impossible to have an abortion, but it’s definitely a deliberate intent,” says Mia Bloom.

Bloom is a professor of extremism at Georgia State University

,

and an expert on far-right forces creeping into power in the United States. When it comes to abortion, she sees

the prohibitions as tentacles of white nationalism and racism.

Bloom points out that wealthy women will find ways to travel for an abortion.

That makes

poor women, especially black and brown women who live hundreds of miles from a state where abortion is still legal,

the real goals of

this court ruling and

the grind of

new laws restricting abortion

in Republican-controlled states

.

Women, especially women of color, have become politically and economically powerful, a circumstance that threatens the patriarchal norms that

dominated

our power structures since the

Founding Fathers Founding Fathers

conveniently forget about the potential rights of the

Founding Mothers Founding Mothers

.

The Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan policy institute, found that between 2000 and 2019, the

resident

voting population of women of color increased by 59%

a profit of more than

13.5 million potential votes, the majority of which would probably go uncast

a Donald

Trump or

Ron

DeSantis.

Black women “basically put Joe Biden in office and they’re the reason we didn’t have a red wave in 2022,” Bloom told me. “So if you’re Harlan Crow sitting there thinking about these things long term, keeping black and brown women poor and pregnant and dependent on the system has taken a long time.”

–

term implications for the ballot box.”

Poor women with children can’t stand in line for hours to vote, she insists. Harlan

Crow is the billionaire collector of Nazi memorabilia who is friends with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in case you missed last week’s big reveal of their friendship. You may recall that Thomas wrote a terrifying concurring opinion on Roe that suggested the same logic

that served as a base

for that decision could be used to overturn precedents protecting access to birth control, sexual privacy and same-sex marriages.

But one panic at a time.

The pronunciation of Kacsmaryk is

a

wake up hard

phone call

that “democracy is fragile,” Skinner said.

She has a granddaughter and now worries about what that child’s future will be like, perhaps one “where she would have to think twice about where she would go to work, where she would go to school,” Skinner said.

Bloom goes one step further in that darkness,

sew the pieces together

of this

dictatorial dictatorial

monster who is the new Republican

party party

. “It’s all part of this Christo-fascist agenda to target minorities,” she said. “Controlling women’s bodies, controlling sexuality, also means controlling the sexuality of gays, transgender people, everything [LGBTQ] letters.”

So Kacsmaryk’s statement is a beginning, not an end.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, said he is hopeful the Texas ruling will be reversed because it is so extreme and out of sync with court precedent.

But if it isn’t, then it is

false

logic, especially that “unborn child” language,

opens a Pandora’s box with its misery and evil aimed at those who have long fought, with some success, for equality and justice.

Chemerinsky said so

female

birth control could be targeted soon, perhaps after the long term

Griswold v. Connecticut Griswold v. Connecticut

decide that

established case law

about reproductive privacy. Also at risk would be the

Laurens v. Texas Lawrence v. Texas

other

Obergefell v. Hodges Obergefell v Hodges

decisions that Judge Thomas singled out in his own

Roe Roe

opinion, which protects same-sex couples from discrimination.

Julia Spiegel, Gov. Deputy Legal Secretary. Gavin Newsom calls the current moment “incredibly alarming and concerning”.

She has spent the past few months helping California plan the Texas ruling, work culminating in Monday’s announcement that the state has purchased a supply of misoprostol that could provide about 12,000 abortions if needed.

and has the ability to get two 2 million pills, enough for nearly 100,000 abortions in total

. Not only does the state offer that supply for free if the drug were to become scarce, it has also offered a template to other states on its purchase order so others can follow suit.

the

cache

is an “insurance plan,” she said

safe, legal and affordable abortion

in California for all women, those who live here and those who have to travel here for care.

That kind of reassurance and action is critical right now because there are plenty of women and girls out there who are pregnant, scared and unsure of their options.

Even if the Texas ruling is ultimately struck down

is it the new normal that the far right continues to attack women and other vulnerable groups.

And it must become the new normal for those of us who believe in civil rights and democracy to be just as loud and forceful as those who prefer to exercise their power unchecked.

Because while babies are cute, authoritarianism isn’t.