The Great Roe v Wade Leak

 It's tailor-made for the midterms. Both parties will fund-raise like mad as the Supremes keep us in suspense for another month or two as we await the final decision. Remember, the leaked document, written by Samuel Alito, is still only a draft. The court may not overturn Roe v Wade as much as punt it back to the states. And conservative states already have gone full bore ahead with their own draconian abortion bans or restrictions.

So who leaked it? My guess is that one of the liberal justices accidentally on purpose left it on her desk where an underling found it. But who knows, and what difference does it really make? We kind of knew this was coming.

At least they can't blame it on Wikileaks, whose founder Julian Assange is still rotting in a rotten British prison as he awaits extradition to the States for trial under the Espionage Act, which was originally passed to quash dissent from American citizens during World War I.

Maybe they'll find a way to blame Russia, which as the USSR actually was the very first nation in Europe to legalize safe, free, hospital-based abortions in 1920 - albeit with eventual restrictions. In 1936, Stalin  made abortion illegal again, except when the mother's health was endangered. This was because war and (sometimes orchestrated) famine had caused the population to drastically plummet. But at the same time, the USSR built more nurseries, more obstetric facilities and increased welfare payments to large families. In that regard, they were certainly a lot better than our own modern Republicans, whose concern for human life is severely restricted to the nine months a citizen stays in the womb. 

 Of course the kids living under Stalin were raised like robots in preparation, for many of them, their ultimate purpose as cannon fodder. As a matter of fact, once the Soviets had prevailed over Nazi Germany in World War II, the generous payments to fecund families were summarily and severely reduced.

Fast forward to more modern times, and the abortion debate in Russia is very similar to that in the United States.  The procedure is restricted and very actively discouraged - once again, because population growth has slowed.

In the United States, the birth rate is also down, at least in part because people of child-bearing age can no longer afford to bring children into the world. Wages are still stagnant, and housing is both unaffordable and hard to find. 

So while Republicans are brazen in their misogynistic and Christian fundamentalist reasons for opposing abortion, the Democrats have passive-aggressively and lackadaisically declined to encode it into law for all the many decades that Roe v Wade has been in effect, and for all the times the party has enjoyed super-majorities in Congress. Then there's the inconvenient reality that Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to retire when there was still a chance to impede the rightward lurch of the court. 

And another unpalatable truth is that, despite the US hegemon's recent heavy reliance on unmanned drones in the waging of the Forever Wars, there is always the continuous need in bellicose nation-states for a steady supply of that all-important cannon fodder,- or least enough human flesh to sit in the trailers and operate the drone joysticks.

Let's hope that just like they did back in the early years of the 20th century, the women who are now protesting and demanding their civil rights in front of the Supreme Court will also morph into antiwar activists and labor unionists, and then the whole neoconservative/neoliberal project comes crashing down as a sort of collateral damage to all the pathocrats who are currently running the place. 

The Supremes, convenient targets for our wrath that they are, certainly do not operate in a vacuum. Notice, for example, the lack of Democratic interest in impeaching Clarence Thomas despite the malign political activities of his soulmate and life partner Ginni.