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Susan Young is the Bangor Daily News opinion editor.
Variations of the same joke have been circulating on the internet this week. Essentially the gag is about how it can be confusing to travel in the U.S. and the world with so many different time zones, with Arizona now in its own zone — 1864.
The joke would be funny if it weren’t so deadly serious, especially for the women of Arizona.
The Supreme Court in Arizona ruled that a ban on abortion, passed into law in 1864 but long dormant, can go into effect. The law, which has no exceptions for rape and incest, was enacted long before Arizona was a state and before women had the right to vote.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, many states have taken steps backward in terms of reproductive freedom. But Arizona’s return to the 1800s is as absurd as it is cruel.
The Arizona law was passed when the state House was led by a man who — sadly, this is not a joke — continually moved west in pursuit of younger and younger girls to marry. When William Claude Jones arrived in Arizona, he was married to a girl who was believed to be 12 years old. She may have been abducted. Jones, who was speaker of the Arizona House in 1864, was also married to girls who were 15 and 14. He had five wives before he died in Hawaii.
“William Claude Jones sauntered into the wide expanse of a Southwestern territory more than 150 years ago, and this man’s morals are now the benchmark for the reproductive rights of the 7 million people who live in Arizona,” columnist Monica Hesse wrote in the Washington Post last week.
Beyond Jones’ questionable morals, the Arizona law was, of course, written and debated by only men. Women would not be elected to any state legislature for several decades.
The morals — and laws — of men written 160 years ago should not blindly be dictating what women can and can’t do with their bodies today.
“Three out of the four Arizona Supreme Court justices who issued the decision are men. They will not have to feel the loss of personhood that I and so many other Arizonans felt last Tuesday morning,” Caitlin Millat, an associate professor at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, wrote in a column published this week by the Bangor Daily News. She is 19 weeks pregnant. “They will not have to plot a trip across state lines to access health care they may need. They will not be forced to set aside their bodily autonomy. And they will not be forced to choose what could be an agonizing life for their unborn child.”
“As they wrote, their decision was not about their ‘morals’ or ‘public policy views’: It was a sterile question of statutory interpretation,” Millat wrote.
But, questions about reproductive autonomy — about when to have children, about potentially terminating a pregnancy if the fetus has a fatal abnormality — are not sterile questions of statutory interpretation. They are often agonizing questions that have far-reaching implications, mostly for women.
When men make strident decisions — or outrageous and offensive comments about abortion and God’s wrath — they are minimizing and, often, degrading women.
Such behavior was wrong 160 years ago, and it is certainly wrong now.
It may take time — far less than a century and a half, I hope — but I believe decisions like the one made by the Arizona Supreme Court will be seen for their cruelty and misogyny and overturned, if not by future justices, by voters who have had enough of policies and worldviews that treat women as second-class citizens incapable of making their own decisions.
