MSNBC Segment: Trump's SCOTUS Pick Will Throw Women in Jail for Miscarrying
It’s been a week since Justice Anthony Kennedy announced he would be leaving the Supreme Court, and already the media has predicted that America is going to become some sort of admixture of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “1984.” Surely the rhetoric couldn’t get any more overheated, right?
Well, that’s when MSNBC temporarily changed their slogan from “This is Who We Are” to “Hold My Beer.”
According to The Daily Caller, in a Wednesday panel discussion about Trump’s potential Supreme Court pick, Dorothy Roberts, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, said that whoever the president picks will put women in jail for mere miscarriages because that’s what those goshdarn right-wingers do.
Which raises one very important question about this theory: Huh?
Roberts’ theory was that “black women, primarily” were prosecuted for using illicit substances while they were pregnant.
She added that “prosecutors (are) already putting women in jail for stillbirths, for miscarriages, and for botched abortions.”
“It’s a very thin line between putting a woman in prison for a still birth or a miscarriage that she’s blamed for, for something she did during her pregnancy, and criminalizing abortions,” Roberts said.
“So we’re already at that point, and I agree with Jennifer that women and others have to protest against this continued criminalization of women, harms to our health, and what I think is misogynistic laws against women.”
Roberts also claimed that part of the problem was that states were enacting laws that put limits on abortion, which is of course a sacrament to the left that must never be touched by any human hands, especially if those hands are white, male and conservative.
There are so many problems with this, starting with the fact that these women aren’t being put in jail for stillbirths, miscarriages and for botched abortions. (For that matter, it’s exceptionally rare, as even The Washington Post admitted in 2015.)
What they’re being put in jail for is doing something — usually taking illegal substances, typically abortifacients — that led to the child’s death. They were breaking laws almost no civilized human being would consider wrong. This is what Roberts has an issue with. This is what she claims is “continued criminalization of women.”
This is piffle, but the problem is that it’s piffle we’re going to hear a lot and which will shape the debate over the next Supreme Court justice.
Without any workable way to stop the next justice from being nominated and confirmed, Democrats are becoming more and more rhetorically desperate.
We’re hearing echoes of Ted Kennedy’s famous demagogic speech that helped kill Robert Bork’s nomination in 1987: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.”
That’s the kind of reprehensible rhetoric we’re going to hear from hundreds of commentators. Dorothy Roberts is just one of them. The scary thing is, however, that it only gets worse from here.
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