Amy Coney Barrett first came to my attention in October 2017 when I was covering Congress and the Trump administration for a news outlet focused on reproductive health, rights, and justice. Sen.
Mitch McConnell had gathered half a dozen of his white Republican male colleagues to defend Barrett’s nomination to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal court that had been involved in a prolonged battle over whether the University of Notre Dame could defy the Affordable Care Act’s birth control benefit and deny contraceptive coverage to students and employees. (The Trump administration later exempted the school in a settlement that’s the subject of its own legal challenge.) Barrett, then a Notre Dame law professor who had never been a judge, belonged professionally to University Faculty for Life and privately to People of Praise, a Catholic group that long referred to women as “handmaidens.”
“The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s a concern,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, declared during the appeals court nomination process to the ire and delight of Senate Republicans. Barrett was a victim of religious persecution by Senate Democrats, McConnell and company argued. In the same breath, they praised Barrett for defending “religious liberty,” the kind that imposes beliefs against abortion, contraception, and LGBTQ rights. The Senate approved Barrett 55-43, including the votes of three Democrats, two of whom remain in the Senate — Sen. Tim Kaine and Sen. Joe Manchin.
For Ginsburg, the right to abortion was as much about equal protection as individual autonomy, according to her 1993 Senate confirmation testimony. “When government controls that decision for [a woman], she’s being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices,” she said. Barrett is like a coiled fist, poised to attack bodily autonomy, including abortion, contraception, and trans-affirming health care. If Barrett controls those decisions for people, they will be treated as less than fully adult humans responsible for their own choices.
As a federal appeals court judge, Barrett joined dissents in abortion cases on forced fetal burial and parental consent that could hardly have been more ideologically opposed to the ringers that made Ginsburg an icon. Ginsburg always thought Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that legalized abortion nationwide and preceded her tenure, was weak: “She continued to critique Roe as poorly reasoned and too sweeping until the end,” journalist and Notorious RBG author Irin Carmon wrote in the justice’s obituary for New York magazine.
Under Roe, abortion remains disproportionately out of reach for people with low incomes and people of color, thanks to the Hyde Amendment’s prohibition on federally funded abortion coverage and manifold state restrictions. Abortion without access is a right in name only. Adding Barrett to the bench alongside Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh provides the last vote necessary to eliminate the federal right to an abortion, no matter how Chief Justice John Roberts votes.
“If and when RBG dies, Trump will nominate Amy Coney Barrett,” I ranted again to a friend last month, as the presidential election began to eat up some of the coronavirus pandemic headlines. This prediction gave me no pleasure. I don’t want to be right. I want women and all people with uteruses to have rights. The best way to honor Ginsburg’s legacy, and dying wish, would be to protest Barrett’s probable nomination with our rage that’s only grown from Kavanaugh and the larger takeover of the federal judiciary.
There’s no better way to describe replacing Ginsburg with Barrett than a cliché: It’d rub salt in the wound that ripped open in people who can least afford their bodily autonomy to be wrested away. Salt in the wound is Trump’s favorite flavor.