Women’s reproductive freedom is on the ballot in North Carolina

For nearly a half-century, the Republican Party has been the anti-Roe v. Wade party. That overarching stance has allowed it to do two things.

The first move has been to rail relentlessly against the purported scourge of activist judges while working successfully to secure the most interventionist, ideological and politically partisan U.S. Supreme Court in American history.

Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas may be called many things, but anyone who claims they were (or are, in Thomas’ case) originalists cannot have read their opinions. And now their usurping colleagues and successors have an enduring stranglehold on our highest tribunal. The Constitution, today, is whatever the Federalist Society says it is.

Second, given the constitutionalization of the abortion issue, Republican electoral politicians have had the rare luxury of pledging their undying hostility to Roe v. Wade without actually casting meaningful votes to strip all women (Republican and Democrat) of a generations old, fundamental component of human reproductive freedom.

They could talk the talk, relentlessly, without walking the walk. But the Supreme Court is about to either overrule or completely dismantle Roe. And the fate of women’s rights in North Carolina will soon lie, principally, in the Republican caucuses of the N.C. General Assembly – what former Republican representative Holly Grange called “the middle-age white man’s club.”

So, as the electoral season now officially unfolds, it’s vital to recall that Tar Heel women’s most basic freedoms are, quite literally, on the ballot.

A lot of Republican women voters, I’m guessing, have long voted primarily to secure economic inequality — continuing to deliver rich folks’ government; legislatures of, by and for the wealthiest among us. They didn’t worry much about their own reproductive freedoms, or those of their daughters, because they assumed the Supreme Court and/or Democrats would take care of that.

Or, even more cynically, they could always rest assured that abortion would be guaranteed by a plane ticket to a less hypocritical state. Sure, that leaves poor women in the cruelest cold; but the central, most enduring tenet of Republicanism is that poor people don’t count.

The dispatching of Roe will disturb these near-settled expectations in unpredictable ways. One possibility is that more Republican women will decide all women should have the liberties they themselves take for granted. Not likely, perhaps, but possible.

And maybe more realistically, as Roe approaches 50, it’s clear many millions of us, women and men, politically engaged and chronically disaffected, have come to believe that essential reproductive freedoms will always be ours.

It’s not possible, the assumption seemingly goes, that in the United States the government will intrude so profoundly, so irrefutably, so unilaterally on our most intimate, affecting decisions. We aren’t statists, after all.

Aren’t we the ones who so profoundly mistrust the wielders of government power? Don’t we rebel at the idea of the controlling and interventionist bureaucrat? The one who will tell us, with such finality, what’s good for us and for the world?

I don’t know if most readers of this paper are actually familiar with the folks who represent them in the N.C. General Assembly. Given my odd career, I’ve come to know a lot of them. I can say, with unyielding certainty, that there are not many human rosters I would so profoundly distrust to make important decisions about my life, or the lives of my loved ones.

Like Twain put it, these budding authoritarians are convinced that “nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.” Vote like your freedom depends on it. You guessed it.