All of this is simply to point out that men rationalizing their need to control women's bodies and their reproduction has been going on forever. And just because there has been recent progress in that regard doesn't mean that the underlying impulse has gone away, as reflected in Alito's draft decision in which he goes back almost a thousand years to illustrate it in living color. Yes, they are "precedents," but if you want to make the point that some precedents are not well conceived, as Alito claimed was the case with Roe, using such monstrous anachronistic examples is a particularly poor way to do it.

-Heather Digby Parton in Salon.com