Roe v Wade has been overturned. How do you feel about that?

[RoseMorninStar]

The subject is far wider-ranging than abortion. It's about personal rights and privacy. Body autonomy and control for a person's own medical care and well-being. Good grief. There are so many different situations that don't all call for the same solution.

I have a friend who studied law and knows her way around Roe pretty well. She says the wording in that document as it is, is shocking. She says much depends on the language of the opinion, which may change before it is published, but the main holding wont. She feels anything LGBT is in danger. Moving on from that, affirmative action. Access to contraception. She says Alito goes out of his way to lay blame on women for not voting people out of office who restrict abortion in states. So vile, and this after the court has already gutted voting rights.

[N.E. Brigand]

This was pretty prophetic for a 16 year old post. Sadly, it's been in the works for decades, and now due to the fiasco that was the actual stolen election of 2016, it has become the reality. The 'forced birth' religious crowd has been working tirelessly for this since 1973. They want a religious theocracy in the United States, and sadly it appears they will get it with the dismantling of civil rights. I remember thinking back in 1979 when the Shah was overthrown and a religious theocracy led by the Ayatollah took control of Iran that something like that couldn’t happen in the Untied States. Thirty five years later and I still didn’t think it could happen, but I was getting uneasy. In November 2016, the reality of the possibility hit home as I saw that the USA just fucked themselves. There seems very little separating the theocracies in Iran, Afghanistan and the United States these days.

Curiously, while Roe v. Wade was the subject of some controversy from the beginning, it didn't really become a flashpoint until about 1980. The Southern Baptist Convention in 1971 called for abortion to be permitted "under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother." And some evangelical leaders in 1973 praised the decision in Roe, saying that it would give poorer families a tool they could use to plan for their future. There appears to have been no discussion in 1975, when the first Supreme Court vacancy since Roe came up, about Republican President Ford naming a candidate who opposed abortion, and there were no questions about abortion or Roe in the Senate confirmation for the nominee, John Paul Stevens. An argument I have seen is that Roe became a controversy of convenience for conservative Christians who were unable to talk (as) openly (as they would like) about what really upset them at the time: race. In the late 1970s, evangelical universities were told that if they didn't integrate, they'd lose their tax-exempt status. I'm not completely convinced by the argument, but something pushed them to the extremist position where they've remained to this day.

[RoseMorninStar]

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Thank you.

[RoseMorninStar]

Matthew Hale, who seems to have 'inspired' Alito, had two women executed for witchcraft. He had many other heinous and deplorable opinions regarding women.

In the 1990's we had considered adopting a child from Romania after the fall (public execution) of Nicolae Ceaușescu. What he did to the women (and children) of that country was horrendous. His intention was to build up Europe's greatest work force. Contraception was banned. Women of child bearing age were subject to forced monthly gynecological exams to make sure they weren't preventing conception. If women were not conceiving as expected the family food rations were cut. When they had children they could not afford or care for the babies were placed in orphanages with deplorable conditions and given very little care or personal attention, sometimes never leaving their cribs. Many of these children were not orphans in the truest sense of the word, they were children families could not care for. Many of the children suffered life-long serious mental and developmental disabilities due to the conditions they lived in. Horrifying, horrifying stuff. I realize that this not what exactly what this ruling is calling for but.. dang, it's going in a dangerous direction, imo.

edited to add: Nicolae Ceaușescu also had a gold toilet/bathroom. What is up with that and these charismatic autocrats?

[N.E. Brigand]

Curiously, while Roe v. Wade was the subject of some controversy from the beginning, it didn't really become a flashpoint until about 1980. The Southern Baptist Convention in 1971 called for abortion to be permitted "under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother." And some evangelical leaders in 1973 praised the decision in Roe, saying that it would give poorer families a tool they could use to plan for their future. There appears to have been no discussion in 1975, when the first Supreme Court vacancy since Roe came up, about Republican President Ford naming a candidate who opposed abortion, and there were no questions about abortion or Roe in the Senate confirmation for the nominee, John Paul Stevens.

More on the history from Seth Cotlar, a professor at Willamette University, whose observations start with this:

"Barry Goldwater’s wife, Peggy, was a founding member of Planned Parenthood in Arizona. George H.W. Bush, as a Republican Congressman from Houston, spoke so frequently on the House floor about family planning that he was tagged with the nickname 'rubbers.'"

And Planned Parenthood was advocating for abortion by the mid-1950s.

I was struck by the polling Cotlar cites which shows that 76% of Americans favored allowing abortions in all or some circumstances in 1975, whereas 80% of Americans hold that position now (with 21% in 1975 and 19% in 2022 opposing abortion in all circumstances). That's not much change. What changed more is that in 1975, only 22% favored allowing abortions in all circumstances, and support for that position is at 32% now.

[RoseMorninStar]

Speaking for myself, it's not so much about 'favoring abortion' as it is being against the alternatives should it be completely and stringently criminalized and banned.. perhaps even including birth control, rape, incest, even for very young girls. I'm also disturbed by the wording of the document which could easily be applied to so many other rights.

[Frelga]

Rose, exactly. I think elective terminations are to be avoided if possible. If we, as a society, agreed that it's an important value, we would provided free and easily accessible birth control, health care, child care, training and education, universal income, and so on.

Instead, the value being promoted here is denigration of women in any role other than a man's property. See, Alito citing Hale.

Making terminations for health reasons illegal is pure evil.

[N.E. Brigand]

A new poll from CNN finds that Americans:

--Want to keep Roe in place (66%-33%)
--Want their own state's laws to be less restrictive on abortions (58%-42%)
--Support a national law legalizing abortion (59%-41%)

But the same poll finds that more Americans plan to vote Republican than Democrat this November (49%-42%).

[RoseMorninStar]

Question: Due to news articles I've read I was under the impression that this is not decided law yet but someone told me today that some wording may change but it's a done deal (perhaps with minor changes) because it's been signed. Which is it?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The person who told you that is wrong.

[RoseMorninStar]

Thanks for clearing that up V.

[N.E. Brigand]

There were protests outside the homes of some Supreme Court justices this evening.

I tend to feel generally that it's inappropriate to protest at people's homes, even those of government officials (key exception: the White House). Like all of us, they're entitled to privacy. But I struggle to reconcile my inclination with these points:

1. Any woman who seeks an abortion -- or many other medical services available at clinics where abortions are provided -- already has to run a gauntlet of protesters when she's engaged in a personal act.

2. The justices in question are expected to invade the privacy of probably millions of women in a far worse way than they are experiencing tonight.

Edited to add: Regardless of the moral question, protesting at people's homes is almost certainly counterproductive to the protesters' aims and likely to bolster sympathy for the justices whose homes they're at.

[Frelga]

I don't think this is going to change anyone's mind one way or the other. And in this specific case, the Justices don't have the moral right to demand the privacy they deny others.

This seems pretty spot on to me. The Institutionalist's Dilemma

The legitimacy crisis is that our institutions are illegitimate. For my entire adult life, beginning with Bush v. Gore, our governing institutions have been avowedly antidemocratic and the left-of-center party has had no answer for that plain fact; no strategy, no plan, except to beg the electorate to give them governing majorities, which they then fail to use to reform the antidemocratic governing institutions. They often have perfectly plausible excuses for why they couldn’t do better. But that commitment to our existing institutions means they can’t credibly claim to have an answer to this moment. “Give us (another) majority and hope Clarence Thomas dies” is a best-case scenario, but not exactly a sales pitch.

[N.E. Brigand]

In my opinion, this 1973 criticism of Roe v. Wade by the late John Hart Ely in the Yale Law Journal (himself possibly a liberal generally, given his dig at Richard Nixon in the piece), although it is being shared now by people I think of as generally sober conservative thinkers -- apparently as a way of reassuring the public that returning to the pre-1973 status quo won't be so bad -- while it does make some interesting points, starts to fall apart by at least its fourth page (there are thirty pages in all) when Ely says that Roe fails in part because its logic would strike down laws that prohibit "homosexual acts between consenting adults" despite the fact that such laws "survive on the theory that there exists a societal consensus that the behavior involved is revolting or at any rate immoral." Ely fails to consider that the societal consensus could be wrong (as the Court got around to recognizing in 1993), and if he's going to bring up questions of consensus, he has an obligation to consider public views on abortion itself.

Beyond that, Ely acknowledges that anti-abortion legislation "cramps the life style of an unwilling mother" who "has begun to imagine a future for herself," but he says that it's not the Court's business to overturn laws that have to balance "the life plans of the mother" and "the serious, life-shaping costs of having a child" and "a mother's opportunity to live the life she has planned" (each of those quoted phrases comes from a different point in the essay; he keeps returning to this idea, although weirdly I don't think he ever mentions the possibility of adoption) against "the state's desire to protect the fetus." As far as I can tell, apart from two brief references to the Court having said that "abortion during the first trimester is safer than childbirth," that's the only way in which he considers the cost to the potential mother: in terms of her situation after giving birth, with no serious thought given to the fact that childbirth itself is a painful and sometimes dangerous procedure and no thought about where a woman shouldn't be forced to go through it against her will!

Also the words "rape" and "incest" are never mentioned.

It appears that Ely, who died in 2003, had a high reputation as a legal scholar, and some of the argument here seems philosophically insightful (and it is funny that he likens Roe to Lochner, the long-since overturned 1905 decision that Justice Thomas would love to reinstate), and he does admit in a footnote that "it is possible ... that I am timebound" (he suspects not, but I think I have shown above that in some respects he certainly was), so I guess this article shows once more that even very bright thinkers have their blind spots.

[Túrin Turambar]

There were protests outside the homes of some Supreme Court justices this evening.

I tend to feel generally that it's inappropriate to protest at people's homes, even those of government officials (key exception: the White House). Like all of us, they're entitled to privacy. But I struggle to reconcile my inclination with these points:

1. Any woman who seeks an abortion -- or many other medical services available at clinics where abortions are provided -- already has to run a gauntlet of protesters when she's engaged in a personal act.

2. The justices in question are expected to invade the privacy of probably millions of women in a far worse way than they are experiencing tonight.

Edited to add: Regardless of the moral question, protesting at people's homes is almost certainly counterproductive to the protesters' aims and likely to bolster sympathy for the justices whose homes they're at.

I think it's critical to distinguish between elected officials and judges. Elected officials have the discretion to vote for or against anything allowed by the Constitution or their state constitution. Judges must interpret the law. In reality, the Supreme Court is politicised and nothing will change that now. But I hate the idea of a court being pushed by public opinion. The right people to protest against are state legislators who pass laws on abortion and the governors who sign them.

If the US Supreme Court upholds a state gun control law (unlikely given its current composition) we'll end up with mobs with AR-15s at Justice Sotomayor's and Kagan's houses. This really isn't a good path to go down.

[N.E. Brigand]

I think it's critical to distinguish between elected officials and judges. Elected officials have the discretion to vote for or against anything allowed by the Constitution or their state constitution. Judges must interpret the law. In reality, the Supreme Court is politicised and nothing will change that now. But I hate the idea of a court being pushed by public opinion. The right people to protest against are state legislators who pass laws on abortion and the governors who sign them.

If the US Supreme Court upholds a state gun control law (unlikely given its current composition) we'll end up with mobs with AR-15s at Justice Sotomayor's and Kagan's houses. This really isn't a good path to go down.

I'd certainly support a bargain such as this:

1. The public agrees not to invade the privacy of justices by protesting outside their homes, in exchange for which:

2. The justices agree not to invade the privacy of members of the public by forcing them to undergo childbirth against their will.

Edit: Of course, that doesn't really take into account your hypothetical, by which a gun rights advocate could rewrite my second item to read: "The justices agree not to encroach upon the right of members of the public to bear arms."

[Frelga]

Yeah, but the supporters of the right wing policies will do it anyway. Restrain on the part of the majority only paves the way for the extremist minority to be more extremist.

Besides,

[Eldy]

Another Leak Indicates Supreme Court Set to Overturn Roe v. Wade - NY Mag Intelligencer

Less than a week after a draft majority opinion was leaked indicating that the U.S. Supreme Court will soon overturn Roe v. Wade and end the constitutional right to an abortion, the pending decision appears to have been confirmed by yet another leak. The Washington Post reported Sunday that “as of last week, the five-member majority to strike Roe remains intact, according to three conservatives close to the court.”

Much more at the link.

[N.E. Brigand]

Another Leak Indicates Supreme Court Set to Overturn Roe v. Wade - NY Mag Intelligencer

Less than a week after a draft majority opinion was leaked indicating that the U.S. Supreme Court will soon overturn Roe v. Wade and end the constitutional right to an abortion, the pending decision appears to have been confirmed by yet another leak. The Washington Post reported Sunday that “as of last week, the five-member majority to strike Roe remains intact, according to three conservatives close to the court.”

Much more at the link.

While overturning Roe still appears to be the likeliest outcome, I think this leak, from what we were told explicitly were conservative sources, tells us is that's it's not quite a done deal. One or more of Trump's conservative justices is yet considering signing on to Justice Roberts' compromise, and the conservatives are using media leaks to try and pressure them to stand fast with Alito's hardline plan.