Alot of people with a lot of power don’t see why women should have jurisdiction over their own bodies. That’s the anti-abortion argument in a nutshell, in that they claim a foetus, or even an embryo, or in some cases even a fertilised egg too small for the human eye to see, has rights that supersede those of the person inside whose body that egg, embryo or foetus might be. What was clear from the rightwing pundits and conservative supreme court justices who have piped up over the last month as arguments were being heard in the most significant abortion rights case since Roe v Wade, is that in a country whose constitution is supposed to grant us all a lot of rights, they are happy to strip away a right so fundamental it’s unimaginable in other circumstances – or that it would be stripped from other people, namely men. In the case, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the state of Mississippi is asking the court to rule on whether it can outlaw abortions after 15 weeks’ gestation. They are asking, in other words, for the right to punish women for being women. On Friday morning, the supreme court issued a mixed ruling on another state law restricting abortion access: Texas’s law, designed to evade federal oversight. Eight of the justices upheld a lower court finding that abortion providers should have the right to sue; Justice Thomas did not join them. The four more liberal judges voted for broader rights to sue; the four other conservatives ruled that they can only sue the licensing officials. Judge Sotomayor, in a passionate dissent, wrote: “This is a brazen challenge to our federal structure. It echoes the philosophy of John C Calhoun, a virulent defender of the slaveholding South who insisted that States had the right to “veto” or “nullif[y]” any federal law with which they disagreed.” She added: “The Nation fought a Civil War over that proposition.” Before the civil war, the US was split between free and slave states; the contemporary nation is increasingly divided between reproductive-rights-access states and anti-abortion states. The goal of the anti-abortionists seems to be to enhance men’s privileges by undermining women’s rights, by making us separate and unequal. (People who do not identify as female also get pregnant and bear children, but the animosity is directed at women and girls, so I’m going to talk about women and girls here.) Since acknowledging this would undermine the anti-abortion case, the emphasis is instead shifted to someone else whose rights are claimed to trump those of pregnant people, the unborn. The unborn are a convenient constituency to advocate for, since they have no voice or vote and anyone can claim to speak for them. Those who claim to protect the unborn are largely conservatives who routinely reject universal access to healthcare, let alone meeting the basic material needs of babies and children with food, clothing, shelter and daycare. They also usually oppose reproductive education, including by defunding and demonising Planned Parenthood (which is where, as a teen, I got the reproductive care that protected me from an unwanted pregnancy). This is how we know that foetuses are not the real subject here. Miscarriages are not generally regarded by anti-abortionists as a loss of human life, unless it’s to criminalise women, some of whom have been sent to prison for miscarrying after allegedly endangering foetuses through their actions. Substance use in pregnancy is considered child abuse in 23 US states, but no one will go to prison for endangering both mother and child through denial of basic needs. Accounts suggest that most of the women being punished under these laws are women of colour. It is widely known that abortion restrictions primarily punish poor and minority-ethnic people too. Wanted pregnancies are often the occasion for impregnators to preen themselves and be congratulated, but unwanted pregnancies are treated as something wicked that women do all on their own. No man is punished under the law for unwanted pregnancy, though a significant percentage of such pregnancies are the result of sexual coercion and refusing to cooperate with birth control. Then there is the risk of homicide – one study showed that 8.4% of reported maternal mortality deaths were murders – with African American women seven times more likely to die this way than white women. The largest proportion of these cases occur at the hands of a partner. There is no other experience that could be so brutal physically and psychologically, could disable for months or result in permanent disability and injury, or even death, that anyone says an individual must undergo when there is a clear and comparatively safe alternative. (Maybe the military draft in times of war is the closest equivalent when it comes to risk and loss of self-determination, and I’m against that too.) Wanted pregnancies and births can be wonderful as well as intense, and I know plenty of people who experienced it that way. But pregnancy and birth can also be, as one of my friends who is the mother of two teens put it, harrowing. I remember a friend’s first pregnancy when she couldn’t stop throwing up, know of people who were bedridden for months, have heard of pelvic bones that broke, hips that came out of their sockets, chronic pain, cases of eclampsia that were life-threatening or fatal, miscarriages that led to haemorrhages. “Women in our nation are dying -- before, during and after childbirth,” said Kamala Harris this week announcing significant investment in maternal health. “In the United States of America, in the 21st century, being pregnant and giving birth should not carry such great risk.” We all know the sheer awkwardness of people in their third trimester who are heavily laden, often exhausted, in a body so transformed in size and function that it no longer feels like their own. To make someone undergo that involuntarily is punitive. To argue that pregnancy doesn’t really disrupt a life is ridiculous, but the supreme court’s Amy Coney Barrett did so when, during the hearing, she asked why the fact that babies could be given up at birth didn’t relieve women of the burden, arguing that if “forced parenting, forced motherhood, would hinder women’s access to the workplace and to equal opportunities … why don’t the safe haven laws take care of that problem?” Imagine telling a woman working as a janitor or a dancer or a farmer or trying to make law partner or compete in her sport that she’s unimpaired by her visibly changing body – and the physical and psychological impacts of it – because she can give away the baby at birth without being criminalised for it? It was also stunning that Barrett recognised that the subject was “forced motherhood”. Given that the majority of abortions are for women who already have children, imagine the impact on the other children of watching their mother go through an unwanted pregnancy and birth. A lot of women choose abortion out of love for their existing children and the desire to parent them as well as possible. The literature of early birth control advocates is full of the desperation of women who could not cope with the physical impact of another pregnancy and birth and the economic burden and workload of another child to care for. Medical providers I know who worked in a remote part of the Himalayas told me of women who came to them for birth control, swearing they would rather die than have another child. With illegal abortions, an alarming percentage of women do die. The mother of another friend of mine died giving birth to that friend’s younger sister, and I know of the brutality of caesarean sections, of 36-hour labours, of the rips and tears of vaginal birth that can cause incontinence, fistulas, and other permanent injuries. The hormonal changes are changes in consciousness, and for people whose wellbeing is already fragile, the experience can be devastating, and when it’s an unwanted pregnancy it can be more than that. The experience of bringing a new human life into the world is profound, and to make it involuntary is monstrous. Denying abortion without exceptions is saying that it’s fine for a child impregnated by her father to have to carry the child to term. We don’t force anyone to donate a kidney to someone dying of kidney failure; forcing someone to donate their body as an incubator is also an outrage. The late-term abortions that get so much attention are both rare and usually because the foetus is dead, not viable, or the mother’s life is at risk. Ireland’s voters legalised abortion after a dentist in Galway undergoing a miscarriage was unable to have the abortion that would have saved her from death. The lawyer arguing the case before the supreme court for women’s reproductive rights answered Barrett’s blithe nonsense thus: “Pregnancy itself is unique. It imposes unique physical demands and risks on women and, in fact, has impact on all of their lives, on their ability to care for other children, other family members, on their ability to work. And, in particular, in Mississippi, those risks are alarmingly high. It’s 75 times more dangerous to give birth in Mississippi … than it is to have a pre-viability abortion, and those risks are disproportionately threatening the lives of women of colour.” Or as the supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor put it, “So when does the life of a woman and putting her at risk enter the calculus?” She knew, we know, that for those who are committed to the punitive violence of forced birth the answer is: never. Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist