️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Saturday, June 25, 2022 ☙ STRATEGIC HOPE 
Protests broke out in the nation’s largest cities yesterday after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in a 6-3 decision, sending the issue of regulation of abortion back to the states. I predicted this would happen last summer after the Supreme Court first declined emergency appellate review of lower-court decisions upholding New York’s various vaccine mandates.Since some of the conservative justices signed the orders declining review, people asked me if I thought they’d changed sides or defected or something. I answered that I thought the justices were protecting something we don’t know about; they wouldn’t want to rely on bodily integrity rights if they were about to do something big like overturn Roe. Then in January when the court issued its pair of mandate decisions, one supporting the CMS mandate, neither opinion mentioning bodily integrity rights or Roe a single time, I was pretty sure this was coming.
I studied this issue closely when I litigated the mask case through appeal. I won that case — the only appellate case in the country finding mandatory masking presumptively unconstitutional — on the strength of Florida’s explicit right to privacy and medical autonomy, which had been well-developed mostly by abortion cases, particularly the ‘Gainesville Woman Care’ case.
Florida’s constitutional right to privacy is relatively new; it was passed in the 80’s during a nationwide push at the state-level related to Roe. Many states passed bodily integrity laws at that time as a result of the Roe decision and the swirling criticisms about the poor reasoning of that case. Even many pro-choice constitutional scholars agreed that Roe had a shaky foundation, so then, as is happening now, states rushed to pass laws and amend state constitutions to protect those rights.
As a result — quite ironically given the politics — the states best equipped to resist mandates during the pandemic were the ones with the strongest local protections for bodily integrity resulting from the abortion battles of the 70’s and 80’s. It’s funny how things work out.
My theory — as I’ve discussed before — is that Roe would never have been overturned without covid.
Many pro-abortion political groups, which had for decades adorned themselves in the morally-praiseworthy robes of personal bodily autonomy, were exposed as hypocrites when they shredded those values in the name of forcing their friends, co-workers, and neighbors to accept a preferred medical treatment. “My body, my choice” instantly flipped, becoming the right’s ironic new slogan, now effectively weaponized AGAINST Roe.
At that point it was just a matter of time. For how, if bodily autonomy is NOT sacrosanct when it comes to experimental vaccines, can it be of any utility when it comes to other personal autonomy issues like abortion? In other words, the “my body, my choice” argument was neutralized, sacrificed for vaccine mandates, and was shown to be not so much a ‘right’ as a benefit to be whimsically parceled out on a treatment-by-treatment basis at the arbitrary preference of whoever is making the rules at the time.
A thin principle of convenience cannot sustain the massive weight of an implied constitution right; the vaccine mandates ultimately cracked the hard shell of Roe’s implied right of privacy and the entire edifice fell away.
I have no idea how all this will shake out. But make no mistake: this Supreme Court decision is just the latest and the most obvious example of how the government’s pandemic overreach has badly backfired. And the backfiring isn’t done yet — not even close.
On Thursday, Time Magazine ran a mushy-headed article with the headline, “Why You’ll Need to Get COVID-19 Boosters Again and Again.”
