Republicans want to ban foreign pregnant women from traveling to the US
Would ICE be performing ultrasounds at the airport?
The Supreme Court did a lot of very bad things this week and then one decent thing: They reaffirmed that the 14th Amendment confers citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil, regardless of whether their parents are citizens. The Constitution states plainly that birthright citizenship must be extended to “every free-born person in this land,” so the fact that the Supreme Court accepted this case at all and that it wasn’t a 9-0 decision is a sign of how illegitimate this court has become.
Justices Barrett, Roberts, and Kavanaugh (kind of) joined the three liberals in striking down Trump’s executive order banning birthright citizenship in a decision that changes absolutely nothing about the way the country has been operating since 1868. This opinion simply upholds the law of the past century. But the way Republicans are melting down about it, you would think Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson personally showed up at their houses to confiscate their guns and tattoo the transgender pride flag onto their necks.
Here’s Matt Walsh, a right-wing podcaster with millions of followers, losing his goddamn mind because the status quo was maintained:
Nazi shadow president Stephen Miller, whose grandparents were immigrants, went on Fox News to say, “If your ruling requires you to SUICIDE your civilization, your reading of the Constitution is wrong….This is absolutely a deep knife wound in the heart of the American republic.”
J.D. Vance, whose wife Usha is only a citizen because of birthright citizenship, said the midterms are incredibly important because Republicans are only one SCOTUS seat away from ending it.
And Trump, who’s fathered kids with two immigrants and whose properties in Florida literally profit from pregnant Russian women paying to come stay there and give birth to US citizens, said the decision was a gift to…China?
Of course, as with all topics that make Republicans angry, the conversation quickly turned to punishing and policing and even sterilizing women’s bodies. The discourse started with a few right-wingers on Twitter before percolating up to primetime Fox News segments with actual policymakers.
I’m curious as to how this would work. Will ICE be performing ultrasounds and asking women to pee on sticks at the airport, or will they just try to eyeball women’s bodies for suspected pregnancies? Will they start doing mass genital inspections at LaGuardia the way they’re trying to do to little girl athletes? Will Mexican women have to get doctors’ notes confirming they haven’t been knocked up before being able to visit relatives in Arizona?
Some Republicans are taking it even further. Here’s the founder of The Federalist, a once respected conservative magazine, suggesting sterilizing foreigners and denying entry to all women:
It’s incredible to me that these same men who crow about the declining U.S. birth rate and fight to ban abortion, insisting they’d rather see women bleed out and die on hospital tables rather than lose a single precious fetus, will turn around threaten to ban pregnant people from giving birth in their country. It’s almost as if there’s a certain color of baby they don’t want on U.S. soil, and they’d go full Gilead to control which women have babies and where.
Birthright citizenship is as American as apple pie. Will this become yet another excuse to demonize women and treat us like cattle?