Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court: American Friends, My Heartfelt Sympathy

I’ve waited until the last minute to write this article, hoping that it wouldn’t happen. Hoping that someone, somewhere, would find some magical way to stop the abhorrent process of this nomination.

Nominating a justice with controversial beliefs to the Supreme Court, while the very legitimacy of the decision-makers is under question by the democratic exercise that is the election: Who could have done something so immoral, other than Donald Trump?

And so I beat around the bush. Procrastinated. Asked the experts legal questions: “Should we be worried in Canada?”

I spent my day in front of my screen, reading reports from the capital, petrified,

as I have been watching the TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” based on the novel of the same name by Canadian author, Margaret Atwood.

Not because reality entirely resembles the nightmarish dystopia invented by the author in 1985, but because certain elements are found just too clearly in the reality of 2020.

In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” women are exploited, raped, maimed, tortured and for the most part, enslaved, reduced to their domestic and reproductive bodies in a society led by men; but men supported by a small group of other women; women who accept this world order and who are perfectly complicit in this male dictatorship.

In this world, the social and political divide is not therefore simply between men and women, but between the group that supports the male dictatorial system, and the group that contests it. And that is what I see in our reality at the moment.

Women who support a system that embraces the inequalities which they themselves, as well as their colleagues, their daughters and their friends, are all victims of.

Women who defend abusers and prefer to support the status quo rather than to join together with their sisters to denounce the injustices that their gender suffers. Voters who support Trump even though he constantly ridicules women, openly insults them, makes fun of their bodies and even boasts about assaulting them.

Women are not united. They are almost everywhere. In businesses, at our neighbors’, in politics. And it is among them that you find those who deny others the freedom to choose what they want to do with their bodies, including whether to continue a pregnancy or not.

Why this often frantic posture? It’s hard to say, because this obsession with the survival of a sacrosanct fetus often contradicts other political choices, notably the death penalty, or even the well-being of children.

If these “pro-life” men and women were worried about the fate of each human being, they would be torpedoing the American president, who has knowingly agreed to the separation of migrant children from Latin America from their parents and who are treated basically like animals, to such an extent that the Trump administration has now lost track of the families of 545 of these toddlers. It is a tragedy of unspeakable cruelty.

The anti-abortion movement is a web of contradictions. But one thing is certain: It is persistent, and determined. And it is endorsed, embodied and even led by women. Women like Amy Coney Barrett, the new United States Supreme Court justice.

She may say, as she did before the Senate Judiciary Committee that considered her nomination, that her personal beliefs as a Catholic woman, soaked in all kinds of orthodoxy of the American religious right, will not come into play when she renders judgment, but who believes her? During the confirmation process, she admitted to having campaigned in various ways against the freedom of choice with regard to abortion, and describes herself as a disciple of Antonin Scalia, one of the most conservative justices in recent decades.

Those who believe in progressivism in the United States have just seen a serious enemy arrive at the center of one of their most important institutions.

Should we, here in Canada, be worried about this too?

I think so.

Because every violation of human rights should alarm us. And women’s rights to freely control their bodies are, significantly, part of our fundamental rights, as the courts here have recognized. No matter which country it happens in.

Because any victory for this strange movement which denies women their freedom can only give energy to those who want the same thing elsewhere, like in Canada.

That said, we can remain calm. Our Canadian legal system does not resemble that of the United States. Here, paradoxically, the absence of transparency in the process of nominating justices to the Supreme Court means it does not happen in an open, partisan, accepted setting, as is the case in the United States, where the justices are not elected but chosen by the elected, who nail their colors to the mast.

The Canadian system, for all its complexity and haziness, retains some sense of embarrassment in response to partisanship, and the obligations of regional representation add an extra element in opposition to those who would prefer nominations that are clearly aligned ideologically.

Therefore, the Canadian Supreme Court cannot be gradually, knowingly, methodically filled with justices whose decisions are almost entirely predictable, as is the case in the United States.

Moreover, compared with our neighbors to the south, our justices are not named for life. They must retire at 75. Barrett is 48; if she lives as long as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom she replaced, she could hold her seat for almost 40 years! You’ve got to be worried about that.

Furthermore, for historical and cultural reasons – notably the Quiet Revolution in Quebec* – the anti-abortion movement, which calls itself “pro-life,” is not as organized or established in Canada as in the United States.

That said, we cannot ever take anything for granted.

American women, abortion-rights Americans and pro-freedom Americans know that now.

*Editor’s note: The Quiet Revolution was a period of sociopolitical and socioeconomic change in the province of Quebec from 1960-1970, which included the effective secularization of the government.