UTA Lecturer Warned Against Kavanaugh Nomination

A lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin warns that the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court could have an adverse affect on affirmative action, even though the recently minted justice has never ruled on an affirmative action case. “Although Kavanaugh has not written any opinions on affirmative action while on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, his likely aversion to such policies is revealed through his attitude toward unenumerated rights — as Kavanaugh describes them, any rights not expressly listed in the Bill of Rights,” Shavonne Henderson & Martin Kamp wrote in an op-ed in the UT News last week. “Last year, while honoring the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Kavanaugh lauded Rehnquist’s antipathy toward ‘free-wheeling judicial creation of unenumerated rights that were not rooted in the nation’s history and tradition.’”

“Chief among the judicially created rights of which Rehnquist was most critical were reproductive rights.”
Henderson is a lecturer of law and assistant director of policy research in the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at The University of Texas at Austin. Kamp is a juris doctorate postgraduate fellow at UTA. Reproductive Rights is the progressive code for abortion.

Apparently reproductive rights tests better with focus groups than abortion does. At any rate, Henderson has taught and written on both subjects.

Indeed, her Linkedin profile shows that she was co-chair of a 2016 “Cocktails for a Cause” fundraiser for Planned Parenthood. Her Twitter account, for some reason, has been suspended.

Incidentally, she didn’t like the late Justice Antonin Scalia either, which also factors into her one-off critique of Justice Kavanaugh. “Similarly, Kavanaugh has praised the late, anti-affirmative-action jurist Antonin Scalia,” she and Kamp write. “In a speech paying tribute to Scalia, he linked Fourteenth Amendment reproductive rights cases with affirmative action cases, collectively describing them as ‘some of the most disputed and controversial areas in law’ that lack ‘objective guideposts that can give us neutral ways to decide these cases.’”

Henderson has also written in opposition to attempts by state legislators to regulate abortion. Curiously, the African-American Henderson argued that regulating abortion adversely affects women of color.

Pro-lifers routinely point out that women of color have a disproportionate number of abortions and that Planned Parenthood preys on them. Yet and still, in another co-bylined article, Henderson claimed one anti-abortion proposal in Texas “will disproportionately affect the poor and women of color in Texas.”

“Those with resources and privilege can seek safe, timely and medically appropriate abortions outside our state borders, while women without such means will be left to deal with the risks imposed by the new law. What remaining options do those women have?”

Pro-lifers routinely point out that women of color have a disproportionate number of abortions. For example, Michigan Right to Life points out that:

• “More than 19 million Black babies have been aborted since the 1973 Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision legalized abortion in our country.

• “Black women have a significantly higher abortion rate than Whites and Hispanics.

• “36.0% of all abortions in the U.S. in 2014 were performed on Black women, however, only about 13.3% of the total population is Black

• “African-Americans are no longer the nation’s largest minority group. Today, Hispanics have outpaced Blacks in population growth.

• “For every 1,000 live births, non-Hispanic Black women had 391 abortions. Non-Hispanic White women had 120 abortions/1,000 live births.”

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