Powerful men are using defamation lawsuits to shut down allegations against them, and anti-choice groups are trying to pass laws criminalizing speech about abortion
. These lawsuits are not meant to determine whether a man should be punished for his abuse of women. They are meant to determine whether women should be punished for speaking about it.
Midway through Depp’s trial, in early May, we got news of another legal drama. Politico published a leaked draft of the US supreme court’s majority opinion in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, which revealed that the court would soon overrule Roe and end the constitutional right to an abortion. In his opinion for the majority overturning Roe, Justice Samuel Alito approvingly cited the 17th-century English jurist Matthew Hale, a figure best known for his participation in a 1662Hale was hostile to abortion, but he also held a dim view of women’s speech and its legitimacy. Notably, his contributions to English rape law imposed strict requirements on the kinds of testimony from women that could be admissible in a court.
This was the official status of feminist speech in America this summer even before the fall of Roe: punished by one court, demonized by ancient authorities, and disregarded by current ones – all in the moment when feminist speech was most necessary. Now, after Roe, women’s free speech rights are poised to be eroded even further. After Alito’s opinion became final on June 24, states moved with military swiftness to ban all abortions. Republican-controlled legislatures advanced laws so inventively punitive that anyone on the left who had predicted them would have been deemed a catastrophizing alarmist just a week earlier.
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