Katya Mendoza: Grab your red cloaks and white bonnets

Women, grab your red cloaks and white bonnets. The depraved GOP is taking us to Gilead.

On Monday, a leaked draft of the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito stated: “Roe (v. Wade) was egregiously wrong from the start.” By his logic, abortion is an “invented right mentioned nowhere in the Constitution” and “not deeply rooted in the nation’s history and traditions.”

In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the fictional and totalitarian version of America, known as Gilead, uses violence and coercion to make women second-class citizens, while men are free to roam and play and determine when and where women are allowed to have babies.

Women’s rights activists dressed as “handmaids” in red cloaks and white bonnets when they held a sit-in protest of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing in 2018. Now, the nightmare is materializing. The conservative majority of the Supreme Court is poised to reaffirm the GOP’s agenda of taking us back to the dark ages of women’s rights, or lack thereof.

It seems far-fetched, right? Not really.

Alito’s draft deals with a challenge to Roe. v. Wade from Mississippi that the Supreme Court will decide this summer. He argues the responsibility of abortion rights should be returned to the “people’s elected representatives.”

So what are the “people’s elected representatives” doing? Just look at the maelstrom of anti-abortion legislation proposed this year in 41 states.

In Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey signed a 15-week abortion ban into law, going as far as denying instances of rape or incest as exceptions. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill into law making the act of performing an abortion a felony, threatening health-care providers with a $100,000 fine and up to 10 years in prison.

In Utah, a “trigger law” awaits that would ban elective abortions depending on the fate of Roe v. Wade, inevitably forcing women seeking abortions to drive to neighboring states, except for Idaho, which became the first state to copy Texas’ six-week abortion ban, allowing citizens to sue abortion providers. The state supreme court recently blocked the abortion ban. Similar legislation exists in Wyoming and South Carolina, according to Planned Parenthood.

The Georgia state Senate approved a ban on receiving the abortion pill by mail, which would eliminate one of the safest ways to have an abortion.

In Kentucky, the state effectively blocked legal abortion access, immediately after establishing unfair requirements on doctors, such as banning telehealth visits for patients seeking an abortion.

Conservative lawmakers in Florida and West Virginia passed similar legislation, the latter recently prohibited abortions in the case of a fetus developing a disability.

In Missouri, Republican lawmakers want to allow lawsuits against Missouri residents who help someone go to another state for an abortion.

Texas is perhaps the state that most resembles Gilead. Texas officials encouraged citizen-vigilantes to file lawsuits against their neighbors or those who they suspect of “aiding and abetting” an abortion. They are qualified to win a $10,000 reward. Call it what you want, that sounds like a bounty on a person to me.

Also in Texas, 26-year-old Lizelle Herrera was arrested for a “self-induced abortion” and held on a $500,000 bond. The local prosecutor eventually dropped the charges.

Now, the Supreme Court justices appear to want to open the door to all these laws, revealing themselves as any other partisan-controlled institution, far from an impartial highest court in the land.

If and when the Supreme Court overturns Roe this summer, legal abortions would decline by an estimated 13%, according to a study by Middlebury College and two other research institutions.

This action will do the most harm to women of lower income who would be unable to afford traveling to neighboring states.

“The typical patient, in addition to having children, is poor; is unmarried and in her late 20s; has some college education; and is very early in pregnancy,” the New York Times reported.

I was adopted and raised Catholic, so one might think that I’d be pro-life or I wouldn’t have a stake in this issue. But I do, because I am a young woman living in a state that’s joining in on the conservative majority’s group-think fantasy. And that is alarming.

Here’s the thing the GOP seems to overlook as they try to play God: Women in Arizona and the other 49 states will continue to get abortions, even if it’s illegal. What does that world look like? Might it include the arrest and detention of the entire female population, making the Herrera case in Texas a sign of things to come?

I dare lawmakers to target women. Go ahead and arrest us. Women will never relinquish the human right of having control over their own bodies. Women and men will continue to march and fight and bail each other out, in the struggle to allow accessible health care for all.

So carry on with your “heartbeat” legislation and fake promises that all life is valuable. If that were true, conservatives wouldn’t condemn civil rights groups as terrorists, they wouldn’t pass discriminatory laws targeting immigrants, natural hair or trans-youth. All children would have access to a solid education and health care. Parents would be able to afford a home and reliable child care.

That might be a dystopian society for conservatives, but it’s one I could get behind.