Justice Ginsburg is often quoted as having said, “Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.” She did exactly that when it came to reproductive rights and abortion in particular. Justice Ginsburg fought, she cast decisive votes, and she led in a way to bring others along by speaking the truth about why abortion matters: Abortion rights are about equality, restrictions on abortion about the forever story to treat women as second-class citizens. Her mark is in the jurisprudence, it’s on our protest posters, and it’s in our hearts.

Writing in dissent in Gonzales v. Carhart, a case in which the court upheld a federal restriction on abortion, Justice Ginsburg plainly stated: “[L]egal challenges to undue restrictions on abortion procedures do not seek to vindicate some generalized notion of privacy; rather, they center on a woman’s autonomy to determine her life’s course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature.”

It was a point she had been making since her 1993 Senate confirmation hearings. In that hearing, Justice Ginsburg emphasized: “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. … When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”

Justice Ginsburg wrote about women and women’s equality as she spoke about abortion. (At the time, there was not yet a broader awareness of the importance of abortion for transgender men and nonbinary people). She recognized that when legislatures spoke of banning or restricting abortion, women were their target. Restrictions on abortion were part of the forever effort and set of laws restricting women that Justice Ginsburg could not abide.

She spoke most robustly in her dissent in Gonzales about the sexism that is foundational to abortion restrictions, and that infected the majority opinion. In that case, Justice Kennedy, writing for the court, upheld a federal law outlawing certain abortion procedures. In the decision, he infamously wrote, “While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort” and further opined that women’s regret could be greater upon learning about the procedure used for their abortion. The court’s solution: Ban the abortions to avert regret.

Justice Ginsburg, in turn, is famous for her response. “This way of thinking reflects ancient notions about women’s place in the family and under the Constitution — ideas that have long since been discredited.” She pointed as illustration to Supreme Court cases from the late 19th and early 20th century upholding a state’s refusal to license a woman to practice law and upholding “protective” legislation that limited the number of hours a woman could work — provisions that had been justified by “our delicacy.” She pointed to passages in which the court justified limited working hours given our “physical structure” and the demands attendant to “a proper discharge of her maternal funct[ion].” She quoted the court in the lawyering case reasoning that the “natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. … The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfil[l] the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.” Men, one of the cases pointed out, were, “or should be, woman’s protector and defender.”

In other words, she called out the court — the five men who constituted the majority — for assuming the role of protector in 2007, for denying women the choice of how to proceed to protect us from regret. As she said, “The solution the court approves, then, is not to require doctors to inform women, accurately and adequately, of the different procedures and their attendant risks. … Instead, the court deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice, even at the expense of their safety.”  

Her implicit message was even more pointed. One of the decisions to which she pointed had language more explicit than that which she quoted:

“It is impossible to close one’s eyes to the fact that she still looks to her brother, and depends upon him. Even though all restrictions on political, personal, and contractual rights were taken away, and she stood, so far as statutes are concerned, upon an absolutely equal plane with him, it would still be true that she is so constituted that she will rest upon and look to him for protection; that her physical structure and a proper discharge of her maternal functions — having in view not merely her own health, but the wellbeing of the race — justify legislation to protect her from the greed, as well as the passion, of man.”

The other justices surely understood the reference. The majority opinion treated women as lesser, as children.

Justice Ginsburg was the only woman on the court at that time
She garnered our admiration and love like no other justice who voted to strike abortion restrictions because she spoke the truth about what was at stake. She spoke the truth about the connection between restrictions on abortion and other forms of sex discrimination.

With Justice Ginsburg’s death, we’ve lost a champion, a truth teller, and a vote. Those who care about abortion, and gender equity, have reason to worry. The last decision of the court to address an abortion restriction struck the restriction, but only by a vote of 5-4. President Trump has promised to only nominate justices who oppose Roe v. Wade. The legal right to abortion, which our movement has relied upon to fend off as many attacks as possible, is in jeopardy. As we speak, the Supreme Court is considering its next abortion case, our challenge to an FDA policy that requires patients to unnecessarily risk COVID-19 exposure to access abortion care. The question is whether remaining justices will allow the Trump administration to reinstate that policy during the public health crisis, endangering lives of patients and providers, just to punish those who need an abortion during a pandemic.
 
With Justice Ginsburg’s death, the fight to protect reproductive freedom is more urgent than ever, as is the need not to settle for what we have now. But Justice Ginsburg taught us how to carry on from here. She taught us how to imagine a world that doesn’t exist yet and to fight to bring it into existence. She was caregiving for her family and arguing cases at the Supreme Court in a decade where there was no such model. She argued for the court to strict laws that discriminated based on sex when there wasn’t yet any constitutional jurisprudence about sex discrimination. With two words, she taught us how to lead even when we can’t win: “I dissent.” And she called on us to call out abortion restrictions as gender discrimination. Justice Ginsburg taught us that the only way is forward — and we will continue to follow her there.

Louise Melling, Deputy Legal Director and Director of Center for Liberty, ACLU

Last week, a hideous allegation emerged in a complaint filed on behalf of immigrants detained at the privately operated Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Georgia. In the complaint, nurse Dawn Wooten blew the whistle on “jarring medical neglect” she says she learned about while working at the facility, including an allegation that a government-contracted doctor repeatedly performed sterilizing procedures on women in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody without their knowledge or consent.
 
These allegations have an eerie familiarity: the U.S. has a long history of forcibly sterilizing Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. And the whistleblower complaint raises the concern that reproductive abuse is not just a part of our country’s past.
 
The issues are not limited to the allegations at the ICDC. The Trump administration’s hostility toward the reproductive freedom of immigrants in its custody has long been evident. In 2017, groups working with young immigrants discovered that the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which has custody over immigrants under age 18 who come to the country without parents, had instituted a policy of blocking pregnant young people from accessing abortion care and trying to coerce them to carry pregnancies to term against their will.
 
After learning of that anti-abortion policy, we sued on behalf of Jane Doe, a then 17-year-old Central American immigrant. Jane found out she was pregnant after being placed in a government-funded shelter, and immediately asked for an abortion. Federal officials responded by ordering the shelter to block her access to abortion care and forcing her to receive counseling at a religiously affiliated “crisis pregnancy center.”
 
Jane took the administration to court, fighting back to protect not only her own right to reproductive freedom, but the rights of a class of hundreds of other young immigrants like her who were also subject to the ORR’s anti-abortion policy. As a result of a protracted legal battle that went all the way up to the Supreme Court, Jane was able to receive the care she needed, and won a court order blocking ORR from obstructing all pregnant immigrant minors in its custody from making their own decisions about their bodies and their lives.
 
But the hostility against immigrants’ reproductive autonomy continued. In 2018, the Trump administration reversed an Obama-era policy that presumed pregnant people should not be detained. Now, ICE is making opaque, “case-by-case” decisions about whether a pregnant woman should be caged. In 2019, the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties and ACLU of Texas Border Rights Center filed a series of administrative complaints to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) based on interviews with more than 100 people soon after their release from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), including Border Patrol, custody. One pregnant woman said she was repeatedly slammed against a chain link fence by a Border Patrol agent. Another said she experienced a miscarriage while detained in a Border Patrol facility for 12 days, but did not receive any hygienic products or medical care.
 
Numerous pregnant women detained by Border Patrol recounted being told by officers to get abortions, all while being held in crowded, unsanitary facilities with little access to food or water. Medical attention for these women was often delayed or denied, all while they endured verbal abuse. This neglect and mistreatment has devastating results: During the first two years of the Trump administration, the number of undocumented women who miscarried while in government detention nearly doubled.
 
In February 2019, a 24-year-old Honduran woman went into premature labor and delivered a stillborn child four days after being detained by ICE. This spring, the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties and Jewish Family Service of San Diego filed a complaint to the DHS OIG on behalf of a pregnant woman who was forced to deliver a child in a Border Patrol hielera while standing and still wearing pants, after Border Patrol agents repeatedly denied her requests for medical attention. And these cases only represent the experiences of immigrants in detention that have thus far come to light.
 
The evidence is clear: Immigrants are routinely abused, silenced, traumatized, and even killed by the U.S. immigration detention system, and it has to stop. Irwin Detention Center must be shut down. And to protect all immigrants and the reproductive freedom of those in detention, we must defund ICE and CBP, dismantle the cruel immigrant detention system, and ensure that everyone has the ability to make their own reproductive health care decisions.

Brigitte Amiri, Deputy Director, ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project

Did you know the U.S. Postal Office existed before the Declaration of Independence? The USPS’ role in this country is so essential that it was written into the Constitution. This year, it’s preparing for an unprecedented task: delivering millions of mail-in ballots for Election Day.

In this week’s episode of At the Polls, we answer voters’ questions about absentee voting along with Joyce Harris, a veteran employee who has been with the USPS for more than 30 years, and Bobby Hoffman, the deputy director of the ACLU’s Democracy Division -— and coincidentally, a former letter carrier for USPS.

At the Polls: Will the Fate of the USPS Affect Voter Access?

At the Polls: Will the Fate of the USPS Affect Voter Access?

It’s no secret that the postal service has been under attack. Earlier this year, President Trump appointed one of his supporters to serve as Postmaster General. Then, just a few months from the election, that appointee, Louis DeJoy, ordered change...

It’s no secret that the postal service has been under attack. Earlier this year, President Trump appointed one of his supporters to serve as Postmaster General. Then, just a few months from the election, that appointee, Louis DeJoy, ordered change...

Listen to this episode

Voting by mail has been a common method of voting since long before the pandemic. Its roots go all the way back to the Civil War, when it allowed Union soldiers to vote absentee while deployed. Today, roughly 24 percent of all voters mail in their ballots. The USPS delivered 137 million ballots in 2016, which is still less than the average amount of mail they deliver in a single day during the Christmas season. The USPS is more than up for the task that awaits them this historic election.

Voting is already happening in many states, so voters need to make their voting plan today. The best way to prepare is to look up your state’s deadlines and regulations in the Let People Vote voter guide, and tune in to At the Polls this week for more questions answered about voting by mail.

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