Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on Monday evoked the dystopia of a full-on “Handmaid’s Tale” after a draft majority opinion by the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade was published by Politico.
“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the document, per Politico. “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled … It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
In an interview with Rachel Maddow, Raskin, a constitutional lawyer, called the leaked opinion “astonishing and appalling” and said it would eliminate all rights to abortion.
“It situates the trajectory of the American right where Fox News and Tucker Carlson want to go, which is to make us in the image of Hungarian ‘illiberal’ democracy now. To keep elections going, where people can be whipped up about various scapegoats. But to carve out and destroy the freedoms and the rights of the people,” said Raskin.
The court’s official ruling on the matter will only be final once it’s published, and justices can change their votes up until then, meaning nothing is yet decided.
Raskin agreed with the draft opinion that the word “abortion” does not appear in the Constitution — nor does “contraception” or the phrase “right to privacy” — though that doesn’t mean those rights should not be protected.
Roe v. Wade was based on an earlier 1965 ruling striking down a law banning birth control, stating that the Constitution’s “due process liberty clause includes a right to privacy over intimate decision-making,” Raskin said. If Roe falls, that would also threaten the right to contraception and privacy.
The draft opinion “would appear to be an invitation to have ‘Handmaid’s Tale’-type anti-feminist regulation and legislation all over the country,” said Raskin, referring to Margaret Atwood’s novel about a future in which women are forced to give birth by a government run by men.
Raskin also said that the draft opinion signals a return of the Supreme Court to its “historic baseline of being a reactionary, conservative institution to the far right of everything else at the federal level in the government.”
Check out Raskin’s full interview in the video clip above.