by Sherry F. Colb
I want to draw an analogy here. The analogy may be offensive to some, but I think it captures a part of what is wrong with Justice Samuel Alito's (SA's) leaked opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Org. and its conclusion that Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey were "egregiously wrong."
From 1932 until 1972, the U.S. government and Tuskegee University recruited Black men suffering from syphilis to come in for treatment for their condition. The doctors then pretended to treat the disease but actually did nothing, initially because no treatment existed and in later years by allowing the patients to think that they were receiving the top of the line medical cure when in fact they were simply getting sicker and sicker. The purpose of this "study" was apparently to observe the course of untreated syphilis in Black men for medical knowledge. Most shocking about the experiment was that it continued even after penicillin became available as an effective cure for the disease. The Tuskegee doctors chose nonetheless to continue with their fake treatments so they could watch the progress of the illness, which ultimately leads to dementia and then becomes incurable.
This experiment exposes how recently medical professionals viewed Black Americans in purely instrumental terms. It comes to mind when when I absorb SA's attitude and the opinion he wrote to make that attitude part of the law. I will hereinafter refer to the Tuskegee doctors and to SA as "the villains," though I understand I must make my case for this appellation.
In both Tuskegee and unwanted pregnancy, the villains did nothing to create the undesirable condition in which Black men and women of all races respectively found themselves. No doctor injected syphilis into a patient and no government actor inseminated a woman. Both Black men and women of all races engaged in sexual activity that gave rise to the conditions in which they found themselves.
What the villains did was to decide that the women and Black men should remain in the state that made them feel sick and that they desperately wished to exit. And indeed, in both cases, there were ethical doctors prepared to assist women and Black men in exiting their unwanted and sickening respective conditions, but someone came along to stop them from receiving that assistance. The Tuskegee doctors effectively prevented their patients from getting help by misleading--much in the way that Crisis Pregnancy Centers mislead women into thinking they are going to an abortion clinic, lies that were approved by the Supreme Court in NIFLA v. Becerra.
SA now invites states and the federal government to criminally punish anyone who helps a woman exit an unwanted pregnancy that may feel to her as awful as and even more threatening than an STD, acquired the same way as the syphilis that so many Black men were left to die of in Tuskegee.