Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is feeling extremely persecuted these days, and the Wall Street Journal is there for him, amplifying his every complaint. It’s also there to gloss over suggestions that the raft of reports of ethical lapses by the conservatives on the court over the past few decades is nothing more than attacks by nefarious liberals.
“[T]his type of concerted attack on the court and on individual justices,” Alito complained, is “new during my lifetime. . . . We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us.” Those poor, poor conservative justices, with their well-paid jobs for life, enhanced by some very wealthy and generous friends.
That part of the interview with the WSJ is galling enough, but when Alito complains that the early leak of his decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization put his life at risk, it’s infuriating. “Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination … It was rational for people to believe that they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.”
He then admitted the fear wasn’t real. “I don’t feel physically unsafe, because we now have a lot of protection.” He is “driven around in basically a tank, and I’m not really supposed to go anyplace by myself without the tank and my members of the police force.”
As opposed to the fear every person in this country who is at risk from an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy feels for their own lives. That fear? It’s real.
You can find their stories in just about any issue of People Magazine, as Laura Clawson has pointed out. There’s this one from last October: “Texas Woman Nearly Loses Her Life After Doctors Can't Legally Perform an Abortion: 'Their Hands Were Tied.’” That woman is Amanda Zurawski, who recently testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about her experience. “I cannot adequately put into words the trauma and despair that comes with waiting to either lose your own life, your child’s, or both,” she told the Senate panel.
For days, I was locked in this bizarre and avoidable hell. Would Willow’s heart stop, or would I deteriorate to the brink of death? The answer arrived three long days later. In a matter of minutes, I went from being physically healthy to developing a raging fever and dangerously low blood pressure. My husband rushed me to the hospital where we soon learned I had developed sepsis–a condition in which bacteria in the blood develops into infection, with the ability to kill in under an hour. Several hours later, after stabilizing just enough to deliver our stillborn daughter, my vitals crashed again. In the middle of the night, I was rapidly transferred to the ICU, where I would stay for three days as medical professionals battled to save my life.
Zurawski pointed out that the forced birth zealots who created the abortion ban that nearly took her life spent a lot of time “talking about the mental trauma and the negative harmful effects on a person's psychological well-being after they have an abortion.” But people like her who experience “the trauma and the PTSD and the depression,” a “paralyzing” experience, are utterly disregarded.
That trauma is being repeated in red states across the country, where the threat of criminal sanctions is keeping hospitals and doctors from providing the care pregnant people in dangerous situations need; The care that they are obligated to provide under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA.
In a first-of-its-kind investigation, the Department of Health and Human Service has determined that two hospitals—Freeman Health System in Joplin, Missouri, and University of Kansas Hospital in Kansas City, Kansas violated that law when they refused to provide an emergency abortion to Mylissa Farmer. At 17 weeks, the Missouri woman’s water broke. There was no way the fetus would survive, and if it stayed in her body, her health and her life were at risk.
Farmer’s experience, and her speaking out about it, led to the HHS investigation. Because the hospitals receive federal money through Medicaid and Medicare, the agency could investigate. It hasn't levied fines against the two hospitals, but issued a notice that they had violated law and warned them to correct the problems that led to Farmer being turned away.
Farmer was able to travel, and eventually obtained an abortion in Illinois. But the experience still scarred her. “It was dehumanizing. It was terrifying. It was horrible not to get the care to save your life,” she told the AP. “I felt like I was responsible to do something, to say something, to not have this happen again to another woman.”
You can bet Alito hasn’t given these women a second thought. He’s too busy bemoaning the fact that the public has found out just how corrupt he and his colleagues are, and are talking about it.
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