Samuel Alito says it took “courage” to overturn Roe v. Wade after his draft opinion leaked—and that the decision cost him friends. A Supreme Court justice lost some friends. The horror. The sacrifice. Someone alert the sympathy committee.
Meanwhile, actual people lost far more than a few awkward cocktail-party invitations.
People have been denied or delayed emergency pregnancy care. They have been forced to continue dangerous pregnancies. Research has linked abortion bans and restrictive policies to higher pregnancy-associated and maternal mortality, with the harms landing especially hard on people already underserved by the health-care system.
But please, let’s center Sam Alito’s social calendar.
That is the entitlement at the heart of this. Men with immense power make decisions over other people’s bodies, health, futures, and lives—then act personally wounded when people judge them for it. They want the authority to impose cruelty without the inconvenience of criticism. They want lifetime appointments, zero accountability, and applause for calling it “courage.”
And then they sneer at “wokeness.”
Because “woke,” in this context, means people refusing to politely overlook oppression. It means naming the damage. It means saying that if you use power to strip millions of people of a constitutional right, you
do not get a gold star for enduring social consequences.
Alito says he lost friends over Dobbs. Good. Losing friends is not persecution. It is not bravery. It is the smallest imaginable consequence for helping dismantle reproductive freedom.
For too many women, the consequences have been pain, medical trauma, financial ruin, forced pregnancy—and, in some cases, death.
But sure, Sam. Tell us again about your bravery.
