Elie Mystal Goes OFF, Says Conservatives Think a Fetus ‘Should Have the Same Legal Rights as Full-Grown Black People’

On MSNBC’s The ReidOut, The Nation’s Elie Mystal slammed conservatives following the Supreme Court oral arguments on Mississippi’s abortion law earlier on Wednesday. He said that conservatives believe a fetus “should have the same legal rights as full-grown Black people” in the United States.

The case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, could lead to the Supreme Court overturning precedents such as the landmark 1973 case Roe v. Wade.

To tee up Mystal, host Joy Reid suggested that conservatives want to have abortion laws that are as repressive as Jim Crow laws.

“The justices were trying to, in a weaselly way, try to brand themselves as the heroes from the Brown vs. Board decision,” she said, referring to the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case that ruled that “separate but equal” segregation is unconstitutional, thereby overturning the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, which ruled otherwise.

“To try to wrap themselves in Brown vs. Board. They love to quote Plessy. That’s one of the anti-abortion world’s famous things they love to go for,” continued Reid. “But they’re trying to wrap themselves in that because they understand that they are going against the vast majority of Americans’ will when they subject women to the, you know, vicissitudes of their state instead of states deciding what women do with their bodies.”

In response, Mystal did not hold back:

Conservatives want you to think that a fetus – a fetus who is pre-viability, it means it cannot exist outside of its mother, it cannot live outside of, of the womb, has the same – should have the same legal rights as full-grown Black people in this country. And that the fact that it doesn’t is some kind of miscarriage of justice – no pun intended – and that the people who shouldn’t have the full rights are the women who are carrying the fetus.

Now, I can prove that a fetus is not deserving of full personhood rights because if it were, they would be arguing that the fetus should be given citizenship. They would be arguing that the fetus should have other rights like a right to education, a right to health care. They would be arguing that I should be able to claim fetuses as dependents on my taxes, which you’ll note, they’re not.

They’re only concerned about the right of a fetus when that right can be used to diminish the rights of women. And that is what the conservatives are all about on the Supreme Court. That is what you heard in stark and I – I think you used the right word, offensive language throughout the court’s arguments today. But this is the day that conservatives have been planning for a generation.

Watch above, via MSNBC.