It’s hard to separate the double-barreled blows to life and liberty. But together, the radical and contradictory decisions to overturn a state’s gun control law while simultaneously relegating a woman’s constitutional right to reproductive freedom to the states has actually dealt the most destructive blow to the Supreme Court’s legitimacy, authority and credibility.

For the first time in America’s history, the court has taken away a fundamental constitutional protection from hundreds of millions of women, effectively turning women into second-class citizens without the autonomy, liberty or freedom to determine their own destiny – as men have – while at the same time expanding the likelihood of that child they were forced to bear being killed with a gun. Meanwhile, while no one was paying attention, it also overturned the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, upending separation of church and state.

“It’s as if the court has taken a Roto-Rooter to the Constitution,” a pundit said.

They insist the states have the authority to decide whether or not a woman may have reproductive freedom, autonomy over her body and the liberty of self-determination (as a man or a woman happening to live in a different zip code or being of a different race, income), but then strike down a state’s authority to protect its citizens from the epidemic of gun violence.

And they did it based on the flimsiest of rationalizations: “Privacy,” “abortion,” not specifically in the Constitution? Neither is “Corporation” (yet Citizens United endowed soulless entities with the right to unlimited spending to buy candidates and elections). What else isn’t in the Constitution? “God,” but a third decision by the Christo Fascist court this week nullified the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause (separation of church and state), requiring Maine to provide public (tax) dollars to support parochial schools while another found in favor of a coach who prayed to Jesus on the field.

What else isn’t in the Constitution? Giving the Supreme Court the supreme authority of judicial review. The monarchal power asserted by these six radical activist theological ideologues has been assumed (Marbury v Madison, 1803).

Some 96 million women of reproductive age went to sleep the night before the decision as whole, equal citizens and woke up as second-class citizens, whose futures were now in the hands of politicians who would never know them or their circumstance or care. Girls who are raped by their uncle, women who could die in pregnancy or carrying a fetus expected to be born with severe disabilities if it survives at all, families without the resources to care for another child no longer have the ability to make their own choice.

Overnight, 36 million women in states where abortion was already banned or had trigger laws, found they were beasts of burden, not sentient adults, but a “host” to incubate a fetus. Many who had appointments (harder to even get than to buy a AR-15) and were even waiting to be seen, were sent home, missing critical timeline for their procedure.

Women who miscarry (one out of four pregnancies result in miscarriages) may not be able to find a doctor willing to endanger their own liberty to care for them, and they may well be prosecuted for homicide. That is not rhetorical, it is already happening. And the likelihood is just as the ban will most likely impact women of color and poor women (white affluent women can simply hop on a plane), who gets prosecuted will be “selective,” just as who gets prosecuted for “voter fraud” or when homicide is dismissed as “stand your ground.”

Is the most frightening part of which rights will be next on the chopping block – contraception and same-sex marriage (also based on “privacy”) or that women whose life may be endangered by pregnancy or carrying a nonviable fetus will be forced to go through full term (America has the highest rate of maternal mortality of any developed country)? Or is it that women will be tracked, traced, monitored for their menstrual cycle, their cell phone usage, mail activity and travel plans and even prosecuted for behavior deemed unsafe for the fetus?

There are now “free states” and “unfree states” – no different than the pre-Civil War era – connected by a 21st century Underground Railroad (“abortion tourism”!). How dystopian is it that California, Oregon and New York are passing laws to insulate patients and providers from prosecution by another state or persecution from vigilantes, today’s slave hunters?

Many are focusing on the ramifications for contraception and same-sex marriage that flowed from Roe’s “right to privacy,” the rationale Justice Harry Blackbmun used (basically reasoning the woman’s male doctor would guide her decision). Even Ruth Bader Ginsberg said that was “flimsy footing” and Roe (just as marriage equality and contraception) should have been based on the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection” rather than due-process (the basis for “privacy”), when she defended Capt. Susan Struck against the Air Force’s mandate to abort her pregnancy or be forced out of the military.

Indeed, in addition to the 14th amendment’s Equal Protection, women’s reproductive freedom is in fact enshrined in the Constitution: in the 13th (barring involuntary servitude), 15th (equal rights regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude), 19th (“on basis of sex”) and the Eighth amendment (forcing a woman to go through childbirth is cruel and unusual punishment, considered a violation of human rights). Why should women not have the same right to bodily autonomy, freedom, liberty and self-determination as men, or even women in other zip codes or income brackets?

And perhaps most of all, the First Amendment prohibiting the establishment of religion. The religious fanatics on the court have no right to impose their theology on the rest of us with different beliefs. A Boynton Beach synagogue is suing Florida, contending its abortion ban violates Jewish teachings that abortion “is required if necessary to protect the health, mental or physical well-being of the woman.”

The court has lost all credibility, authority and legitimacy and its rulings should have no force of law.

Protesters at one of the hundreds of rallies in reaction to the ruling chanted “Pro-Life is a Lie. You don’t care if women die.” A man at the rally at Nassau County Courthouse held up a sign, “Abort the Court.”

But since that is not possible, what is necessary is that pro-choice Democrats come out in record numbers in the 2022 midterms and 2024 election.

You may think women are safe in New York, New Jersey or California. But if the Republicans take over Congress, Mitch McConnell has declared his intent to ban abortions federally; the extremist Supreme Court could give personhood to a zygote, giving it more rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness than its mother. And if a Republican takes over as governor or the state legislature in Albany, women in these states could lose cherished freedom as well.

“My administration will use all of its appropriate lawful powers,” President Biden said. “But Congress must act. And with your vote, you can act. You can have the final word. This is not over.”