old style

Remember film and telexes and typewriters and carbon sets and pay phones?

Adam Cohen on the old-style research for his book

A few people at the demonstration outside of the Supreme Court carried one of these old-style recording devices, but not many. By the time you wrote down a quote or a crowd estimate in your notebook, the tweet or the video or the photograph was already on line. And by the time Whole Woman's Health had stated its case against the restrictive "trap" abortion clinic laws in the state of Texas, the hundreds of people at the rally had posted up selfies with their signs and voices ("Repro Rights! Repro Rights!") and spread their messages far and wide: Keep abortion legal and accessible. Keep the government out of my uterus. A woman has to be able to control her own destiny.
   Adam Cohen has just published a book about perhaps the most egregious example of the Supreme Court invading women's uteri, Imbeciles (Penguin Press). "Three generations of imbeciles are enough," read the blistering 1927 decision by Oliver Wendell Holmes that endorsed the sterilization of some 60,000 people for being "feeble-minded" and gene-pool buzzkills. In the judgement, that is, of a bunch of arrogant, powerful white men.

And really, what has changed here? Arrogant, powerful white men are still trying to tell the little women what's best for them. Today, however, at the moment there are three women on the Supreme Court also making their voices heard. Let's just hope that old-style justice does not prevail. For if it does, old-style abortion—already on the rise in states like Texas and Louisiana—will also prevail.

One girl asked a faraway clinic what she might use from the kitchen to cause abortion.