There are Republican candidates in the forthcoming midterms who now openly suggest that any woman who has an abortion should be charged with murder.
Take State Senator Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, for example. Mastriano has said he wants to outright ban all abortion, with no exceptions for rape, incest or threats to the survival of the mother.
But he goes further. He says he also wants to charge any women who has an abortion with murder. How dare these uppity women keep their own counsel and make their own healthcare decisions? Can't have that. Mastriano and other socially conservative candidates know what is best for you.
From an Irish perspective we have seen all of this before. Anyone who remembers our own fractious abortion referendums will remember what happened after the total ban on all procedures in Ireland in the 1980s: we placed Irish women and girls in a dangerous, often fatal bind.
Protecting our idea of ourselves as the last bastion of Catholic morality in Europe, we neglected to give equal thought to the plight of generations of vulnerable Irish women and girls, to those who had been raped by a stranger or by a relative, as well as to those who had suffered unforeseen medical complications during pregnancy, complications which could no longer be treated by the doctors who had their hands tied by the ban.
Multiple unforgettable tragedies ensued, which were made worse by being so predictable. Worse again was the certain knowledge that the majority of these tragedies could have been prevented had we pursued a sensible path. Instead though we decided to scapegoat the unfortunate to protect our sainted idea of ourselves.
That impulse isn't confined to Ireland obviously. America's social conservatives are on a five-decade-long culturally regressive march, hoping to wind the clock back on every major progressive piece of legislation of the past one hundred years.
Capturing the nations courts to enact their unpopular social rulings is the only option still open to a party that has been firmly out of step with the majority of public thinking on social issues here for decades.
Although 58 percent of the public supported leaving Roe versus Wade as it was, this summer the conservative heavy Supreme Court ruled in favor of the 32 percent who had long wanted it overturned.
In the shocking June 24 ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas gave us all a clear signal about where this back to the future social conservative campaign was ultimately headed, writing: “In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell."
What this means is that he is recommending outlawing contraceptives, LGBT marriage, and is even suggesting re-criminalizing simply being LGBT itself. So every major cultural advance of the past 50 years, every progressive and life altering court ruling, could soon to be overturned by the GOP's rubber stamp court.
Some say that the court won't overturn the long-settled right to contraception, but tell that to half the people of the United States of America who just - for the first time in the nation's history - watched the Supreme Court remove a long-settled right to abortion, rather that protecting or expanding it.
The scale of the mayhem in the Capitol building during the insurrection is still only coming to light
It's arguable if the majority of voters have paid attention to the far right tilt of the Republican Party and to the Supreme Court it now depends on to overturn the social progress of the last century.
It's arguable if the majority of voters is particularly sore about the last three conservative appointed Supreme Court essentially lying to the Senate about Roe versus Wade being settled law in their confirmation hearings.
The real barometer of how far to the right the GOP and the Supreme Court have tilted is best seen in the court's own rulings. This is a court that passionately believes that states can not be trusted to regulate guns – but that also passionately believes that women can not be trusted to regulate their own bodies and reproductive health choices.
So if you want a future with less rights, less protections, less choice and more danger, then you should vote for the social conservatives who plan to bring all that back to you.
But if you want to live in a country where you have the right to decide for yourself, moving forward with your own life and your own choices, you'd best make a plan to vote this November.
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