You probably recall the panicked warnings from many critics of last year’s Dobbs decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, particularly Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Dobbs, they claimed, didn’t just end the federal constitutional right to abortion. It marked the beginning of the end of rights to privacy, bodily autonomy and more, they said, so freedoms on things like contraceptives, interracial marriage, same-sex marriage were all on the chopping block.
In truth, only one justice, Clarence Thomas, writing in a separate opinion, wrote that the Court should consider chucking the broader foundation that underpinned the earlier abortion right, as well as rights to privacy and bodily autonomy.
Lightfoot therefore didn’t hold back on Thomas. “F— Clarence Thomas,” she said.
And she said this to CBS:
"This isn’t just a decision about abortion. It’s not and it’s never been just about the sanctity of life, or even children. It’s a much bigger and frankly scarier reality than that, and instead part of a long, demented game that a certain faction in our country has been playing, to stop at nothing to access power and dominion over other people, especially women and people of color."
But now it’s Lightfoot’s Chicago that is urging that broader assault on those underlying rights.
In the city’s federal litigation over mandatory Covid vaccines, workers who objected base their case, in part, on violation of those underlying constitutional rights — a substantive due process right to bodily autonomy. A forced jab, in other words, violated their right to bodily autonomy.
But the city is arguing that right is now entirely gone — that the Dobbs decision should be interpreted to have “conclusively foreclosed” bodily autonomy rights. Its brief filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois includes this:
"In addition, Plaintiffs’ prior argument that the Vaccination Policy infringed on a substantive due process right to 'bodily autonomy' … has now been conclusively foreclosed by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org., so the legal basis upon which their substantive due process claims depended is even less sound. Accordingly, Plaintiffs’ 14th Amendment claims should be dismissed with prejudice."
Clarence Thomas and Lori Lightfoot
That’s going further than even Justice Thomas went in his Dobbs opinion. Thomas wrote that the court should reconsider the whole concept of substantive due process rights, acknowledging that the majority didn’t do that.
But the city is asking the court to say the Dobbs decision already did that. And Thomas left the door open to maintaining rights like privacy and bodily autonomy based on other theories, which the city apparently rejects.
Aside from contradicting Lightfoot’s position on where the law should go on this matter, the city’s interpretation of Dobbs is simply wrong. The majority Dobbs opinion is said to be unique in how much it devoted to explaining what it is not about, as opposed to what it is about. It says repeatedly and emphatically that it’s limited to abortion only.
Further background on the city’s brief and the litigation over its vax mandate is here, from the Cook County Record.
Editor's note: This article was first published at Wirepoints.