This is part of Opinionpalooza, Slate’s coverage of the major decisions from the Supreme Court this June. Alongside Amicus, we kicked things off this year by explaining How Originalism Ate the Law. The best way to support our work is by joining Slate Plus. (If you are already a member, consider a donation or merch!)
In United States v. Rahimi, the Supreme Court affirmed the commonsense notion that the Second Amendment allows the government to prohibit someone who poses a risk of perpetrating domestic violence from possessing a firearm. Some will laud this decision as a victory for survivors of intimate partner violence. And the court did reach a reasonable outcome in upholding the federal statute at issue. But the majority opinion glosses over the pernicious realities of domestic violence, and after its first section, it actually ceases to mention domestic violence at all. Moreover, Rahimi does not erase the fact that this court put pregnant survivors in extreme danger with its 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Intimate partner violence is incredibly widespread throughout the United States, and pregnant people are particularly vulnerable to this violence. Homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant women. In fact, homicide causes more pregnant people to die than the three leading medical causes of death during pregnancy. More than half of female murder victims writ large are killed by an intimate partner, and nearly 7 out of 10 pregnancy-associated homicides involve a firearm. And pregnant people who survive intimate partner violence are at significantly increased risk of obstetric complications.
Ensuring that pregnant survivors have means of accessing freedom and social supports is critical to ameliorating violence. The federal statute at issue in Rahimi can help with that. Though it utilizes the carceral system to do so—a far-from-perfect solution to intimate partner violence, as Ria Tabacco Mar has highlighted—the law prohibits firearms possessions by people with domestic violence restraining orders against them, which can prevent apparent abusers from wielding a lethal weapon.
But the idea that the Supreme Court is actually concerned with intimate partner violence was already shattered by the opinion in Dobbs. In the year following Dobbs, calls to a domestic violence hotline that mentioned reproductive coercion nearly doubled, and this is unsurprising given the relationship between reproductive rights and intimate partner violence. A critical measure to ameliorate domestic violence is ensuring that pregnant people experiencing violence have the autonomy to make decisions about their own reproductive health care, including having the choice of whether to carry a pregnancy to term. In the Turnaway Study, a longitudinal study of women who were able to have an abortion and women who wanted an abortion but were not able to have one, women who were prevented from having an abortion were slower to terminate relationships with abusive partners. And those who had children were more likely to have sustained contact with their abuser over time, putting them and their child or children at greater risk for violence.
This makes complete sense; these women were not only forced to carry a pregnancy to term, but then often had to deal with long-term ramifications of raising a child whose other parent is a perpetrator of abuse. Of course they were more likely to continue to have contact with their abusive partner, as compared to women who were not forced to have children with their abuser. These long-term consequences underscore the importance of the ability to choose whether to terminate a pregnancy for someone experiencing intimate partner violence.
But in Dobbs, the Supreme Court enabled states to rob women of their ability to decide whether to carry a pregnancy to term, ignoring the ramifications of limited access to abortion on intimate partner violence that a prior iteration of the court had underscored during the 1990s in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. In Casey, the court upheld Roe v. Wade and discussed the prevalence and severity of domestic violence, even highlighting the district court’s finding that “often the worst abuse can be associated with pregnancy.” By overturning Roe in Dobbs, the court allowed states to prevent pregnant people from having abortions. And in the numerous states that have since banned abortion, pregnant people experiencing intimate partner violence now have even less ability to control their own bodies and fates, especially given the lifelong consequences and dangers of childrearing and co-parenting with an abusive partner or ex-partner.
The Supreme Court’s historical analyses in Dobbs and New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen further illuminate the extent to which the court does not care about intimate partner violence. In both cases, the court explored whether history and tradition supported the right at issue. The “history and tradition” that the court examined occurred before women and people of color had the right to vote, let alone were treated as equal members of American society, and certainly before widespread public acknowledgement that intimate partner violence should result in civil and/or criminal penalties. In Rahimi, the court attempts to apply the same “historical” analysis, but that attempt falls flat, especially given that courts invoked notions of privacy to ignore and/or allow intimate partner violence throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. And as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson highlights in her concurrence, the majority fails to provide a coherent description of how lower courts should evaluate historical sources in Second Amendment cases moving forward.
Rahimi put the court’s treatment of intimate partner violence on display, and perhaps that is partly why the court upheld the federal statute at issue—while also almost entirely ignoring that this case was about intimate partner violence. Don’t let this opinion convince you that this court cares about survivors of intimate partner violence broadly. By allowing states to remove bodily autonomy from pregnant people who are subject to abuse—that is, people whose autonomy has already been limited—this court has shown that it is not interested in preserving the rights of survivors.