In a blink of an eye, women in America lost their freedom. On Friday May 24, 2022 women woke up to the horrific news that they were robbed of owning their bodies. Six power-lusting Justices, with a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land, told women they are no longer equal citizens. They told women that a single-cell organism is worth more than any woman’s life. Disregarding the Constitution’s requirement of the separation of church and state, six Justices ruled that one set of religious beliefs is enough to push all girls and women into bondage of forced pregnancies. Unlike men, women no longer have control over their own bodies.

In robbing women of Roe v. Wade the six Justices aligned themselves with fascists’ rule of a minority over the will of the majority of Americans who oppose overturning 50 years of reproductive freedom. Fascist regimes have always understood that controlling women’s bodies is an essential step to political brutally in all areas of social life. Denying women reproductive liberty would keep them subjugated, “Barefoot, Pregnant and the Kitchen” – in the original German “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” – the hallmark of despotic regimes. Trump, who owns three of the six Justices, signaled that in his America powerful men could not only grab women’s genitals, they could control them. The process is simple, when a man’s sperm cell swims up through the vagina and into the uterus of a woman and joins with the woman’s egg cell, her body, unlike his, no longer belongs to her.

Self-ownership marks democracy and reflects the American value of individual sovereignty and autonomy described so eloquently by Tocqueville as the American principle that individuals have the right to determine their destiny. For women to shape their destiny means the freedom to decide whether or not to have children and when they would like to have them. Self-ownership is most cruelly denied when a girl/woman is sexually assaulted, raped and forcefully impregnated and is forced to carry the pregnancy.

Moreover, the Supreme Court and Republicans who proposed new restrictions have ignored the fact that they have bled religious beliefs into nullifying women’s right of reproductive freedom and violated the separation of church and state; they infringed on the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

The American right to freedom from religious coercion was the argument made by Justice Ginsburg in the Hobby Lobby case. The Justice wrote that for Hobby Lobby to deny women comprehensive health care, “would deny legions of women who do not hold their employers’ beliefs access to contraceptive coverage that the ACA would otherwise secure.”

On July 30 2014 SCOTUS decided 5-4 to allow corporate self-ownership to outweigh women’s right. This 5-4 division in the Supreme Court resulted in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg writing a dissenting opinion joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and mostly joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer. Three women, and one man disagreed with five men about the law. The disagreement was an important reminder that the legal system is an interpretative/ideological science that at times undermines American civil rights in states and in the Supreme Court. In the case of Hobby Lobby the highest court of the land has already increased the rights of corporations and reduced the civil rights of women.

Justice Alito justified his decision in favor of Hobby Lobby writing that, “the humans who own and control those companies” are those who matter. Yet the humans who are women have no control of their bodies. To sit on the Supreme Court is clearly a position of privilege and immense power that must come with a responsibility not to harm a class of people, in this case women. So what are some civic lessons that American citizens can draw from the acts of six Justices and a Republican repressive apparatus? A most critical lesson is that we have not paid enough attention to this unholy alliance in which, under the veil of democracy, the rights of citizens can be taken away in a blink of a vote.

Women’s historic fight for equality was marked in 1920 in the right to vote and etched in 1973 Roe V. Wade, in the right to own their bodies and the freedom of reproductive decisions. Reproductive liberty, a basic human right, was wiped out, returning women to a bleak life of the rise of an already high maternal mortality and morbidity in America, which is the highest among industrialized countries. Denying women’s ownership of their bodies will be accompanied by enormous emotional distress, a revival of a Stasi-like regime of spying on women, primarily through a vast network of citizens-turned-informants, open to vigilante violence.

The current Supreme Court’s power to take away women’s reproductive rights with no legal or ethical oversight is now in full display. The last three appointments by an unhinged power-hungry president are no less craven than the man who wanted to be president for life. All three of them brazenly lied to the Senate and the country and denied that they harbored any thought to overturn Roe. They lied under oath to get a lifetime position with no repercussions for reintroducing bodily harm on human beings. These are the same arrogant men (and one patriarchal woman) who on June 23 supported the right of men in love with guns to carry guns, including weapons of mass destruction everywhere, in schools, churches, synagogues, supermarkets and shopping malls. It happened tragically once again on the Fourth of July parade and turned Highland Park into a killing field in our country.

The question for us the majority is whether there is a way to restore stolen civil rights by the very court that is supposed to protect them. Article III, Section I states that “The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” Although the Constitution establishes the Supreme Court, it permits Congress to decide how to organize it. Even the number of Supreme Court Justices is left to Congress — at times there have been as few as six, while the current number (nine, with one Chief Justice and eight Associate Justices) has only been in place since 1869. It is time to change the number and this is the moment ,when there is still a Democrat in the White House and a majority in Congress, to increase the number of justices.

And while we wait for the Supreme Court to expand its size there will be a battle between free states and forced-birth states, and a battle within forced-birth states, a battle that will be waged on legal, political, and cultural fronts.  It will be a war between forced birth advocates on one side, and supporters of women’s rights to abortion on the other, including the pregnant women themselves and their immediate supports, health care providers, organizations supporting abortion, and politicians supporting abortions.

Everyone who cares about the right of women to own their bodies must become part of this fight against tyranny. And everyone who cares about religious freedom must join. And everyone who cares about racial equality and the right of Americans to be safe from gun violence must join. And those who want to protect the right to marry, a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person, and the right to gender identity, and everyone who sees the danger of climate change and everyone who wants to see restoring human rights to the Supreme Court, all must join. We draw on the prophet Amos, “Let justice roll on like a river, and democracy like an ever-flowing stream.”