A few weeks back, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, I knew the same thing everyone in the country who passed ninth grade civics, even if taught by a moonlighting football coach, knew; The decision didn’t “ban abortion“; it merely forces abortion proponents to do what gun rights supporters have had to do for the past 55 years; convince voters.
They, like us Second Amendment people, would have to go through the long, arduous, and provided ones cause is right, ultimately rewarding process of convincing people one voter, one legislator, one bill or issue at a time.
In some cases, I told people; “You keep throwing around polls saying 90% of the American people support abortion on demand. It should be a cakewalk“.
Of course, it might also mean having to make occasional compromises to convince those people.
Maybe this is the problem:
If this poll is accurate, the choice mob is going to have to make some concessions to get to that massive support they claim.
And as we saw in 1993/1994 and in 2009/2010, if there’s one thing abortion supporters hate, it’s any compromise at all, and even the flimsiest margin of the issue.
There are really two sides to the coin I’m looking at, hair: on the one hand, there’s nothing quite as pathetic as a group of people realizing that the information they’ve been given is deeply faulty.
On the other side of the coin, there’s nothing quite as dangerous as a bunch of people who have spent 50 years believing they’ve been entitled to get their way on every particular of an issue, not getting their way on any particular of the issue.
My thought for the past few years is that pro-abortion people cannot make concessions because if they do, their fiscal model collapses. They cannot withstand a withdrawal of subsidies, and they cannot withstand reasonable restrictions on abortion–they are even trying to get abortions done by those who are not even doctors in some states. That’s how flimsy their finances are.
In other words, even when legal, abortion is a back alley sort of thing, simply because those seeking it generally don’t have the funds to pay for what the procedures ought to cost.
I would like to see a state-by-state breakdown of the poll.
IMHO, as a non-lawyer, I doubt if a national abortion law would be constitutional.
It is often noted on the Right that Joe Biden has terrible political instincts. This isn’t really a criticism of Biden’s style, if his political instincts were better, he would be more dangerous.
To a lesser extent, the same could be said of his party. I am not aware of any national Democrat politicians actually criticizing Biden’s boneheaded moves.
Promoting a single, national law governing abortion (pro or anti) is simply unwise. There is no national consensus on abortion for such a law to enforce.
The Constitutional problem is with so-called “non-enumerated rights”: abortion rights — which were brought under a right of privacy that was read into the 14th Amendment — presented a particular challenge for the Court.
The reason for this is because no one can say with scientific certainty when life begins. Anyone who does make such an assertion, whether on the left or right, is asserting an opinion or a belief. He or she is professing his or her faith and nothing more.
With Roe v. Wade, the Court effectively threw up its hands by saying the only constitutionally appropriate way they could resolve the question was with reference to viability.
It is this approach American theocrats cannot accept because Roe v. Wade was in essence an attempt to resolve a morally charged issue while still respecting the establishment clause.
The thing about Roe that really chaffs the religious right is the fact the Supreme Court resolved the issue with reference to science, and not to moral or religious values (meaning their values, naturally).
The putative constitutional issue — whether there is a right of privacy — only has masked the real issue, which was whether the Supreme Court should have respected the moral (really theocratic) impulses of a certain segment of society over the interests of others.
The putative constitutional issue — whether there is a right of privacy — only has masked the real issue, which was whether the Supreme Court should have respected the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, leaving the question of how to regulate abortion to the province of the legislatures in the several states.
Fixed it for you.
This is an interesting moment for the US as different attitudes to one question cuts the federation up into dozens of statelets. This clearly demonstrates that fundamental questions like abortion should be dealt with on the federal level.
Bounty laws for bringing women to court who had an abortion elsewhere are particularly disgusting as the both seek to hijack the legal integrity of pro-choice states and foster a culture of spying and denunciation. The comparison to fugitive slave laws is an apt one.
^ Your comment indicates you do not approve of federalism, which is the essence of the American form of government. Individual states make their own decisions on matters which are not fundamental rights protected by the Constitution. It’s often called the ‘laboratory of democracy’ because different states get to experiment with different solutions to societal problems, finding the one which works best for them, instead of a one-size-fits-nobody ‘solution’ imposed from above.
What you want is a dictatorship with everything run out of Washington and local states having no say at all, but only so long as the dictators are Liberals. In other words, you want to overthrow the United States government.
It’s always helpful to return to the source material. It acts as check on the fevered imagination.
From Alito’s opinion in Dobbs: “Our decision is not
based on any view about when a State should regard pre-
natal life as having rights or legally cognizable interests”
So it looks like that lady in TX who thought that, post Dobbs, being pregnant entitled her to use the car pool lane is going to lose her case.
Just to clarify: Alito made it clear in his reasoning in the draft opinion why and how they will go after other unenumerated rights.
His soothing denials that this will happen can of course be discounted immediately.
More proof we are/have been governed by the tyranny of the minority elite. I wonder when the silent majority will finally gain its voice.
I think that Emery is referring to Thomas’s concurrence with the majority opinion. Because Alito said pretty much the opposite of what Emery believes that he did.
From Alito’s opinion:
The abortion right is also critically different from any other
right that this Court has held to fall within the Fourteenth
Amendment’s protection of “liberty.” Roe’s defenders char-
acterize the abortion right as similar to the rights recog-
nized in past decisions involving matters such as intimate
sexual relations, contraception, and marriage, but abortion
is fundamentally different, as both Roe and Casey acknowl-
edged, because it destroys what those decisions called “fetal
life” and what the law now before us describes as an “un-
born human being.”
And:
The most striking feature of the dissent is the absence of
any serious discussion of the legitimacy of the States’ inter-
est in protecting fetal life. This is evident in the analogy
that the dissent draws between the abortion right and the
rights recognized in Griswold (contraception), Eisenstadt
(same), Lawrence (sexual conduct with member of the same
sex), and Obergefell (same-sex marriage). Perhaps this is designed to stoke unfounded fear that our decision will im-
peril those other rights, but the dissent’s analogy is objec-
tionable for a more important reason: what it reveals about
the dissent’s views on the protection of what Roe called “po-
tential life.” The exercise of the rights at issue in Griswold,
Eisenstadt, Lawrence, and Obergefell does not destroy a “po-
tential life,” but an abortion has that effect. So if the rights
at issue in those cases are fundamentally the same as the
right recognized in Roe and Casey, the implication is clear:
The Constitution does not permit the States to regard the
destruction of a “potential life” as a matter of any signifi-
cance.
We know that even the left wing’s hero, now pariah to some of them, RBG, said that RvW was bad law and destined to be overturned. I would really like to have seen whether or not her position changed had she been involved in the decision.
Also, JD can speak to the prevalence of the fact that over the years, several murders of pregnant women, were charged as two murders, I don’t seem to recall anyone arguing how far along the pregnancy was by defending counsel.
In a previous employment, we were doing a lot of work in Colorado, at the time they legalized weed.
We received a memo reminding us that marijuana was not legal in South Carolina, nor by the feds and that our terms of employment included random drug testing.
The implication was clear, and received.
Women from civilized states who slouch over to degenerate shithole states to dispose of their offspring would do well to stay there.
They’ve made their “choice”.
We have a Supreme Court with five justices whose fetish with 1787 is leading our nation down a dangerous path.
Now it is Dobbs, but where does it stop? Will this Court repeal the Griswold case (right to contraception) and the Loving/Obergefell cases (the right to marry who we choose)? Those rights are not expressly enshrined in the 1787/1791 (Bill of Rights) texts.
Outside of privacy, there is no right to travel in the words of the Constitution, either, although the Supreme Court has held that one exists. So maybe the red states who have banned abortion will also pass laws banning pregnant women from traveling to other states where abortion is legal? How would our Supreme Court respond?
And on an even more fundamental scale, in 1896 the Court held, in Plessy v. Ferguson, that laws which segregated the races did not violate the Constitution so long as the accommodations were equal. In 1955, in Brown v. Board of Education, the Court overruled Plessy, with the then-novel interpretation that segregation of the races in education violated the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution, with the famous words that “Separate but equal is inherently unequal.”
There is no right to racial integration, or any prohibition of segregation, in the text. (The 13th Amendment bans “slavery or involuntary servitude”.) And in 1787, the races were most certainly not integrated.
So which Constitutional rights will Sam Alito and his gang come for next?
^^See my 10:59 you ninny.
This is the issue I’m most looking forward to:
Can states validly declare that life begins at conception? The Washington Post has a story about a Texas woman who was ticketed for driving alone in the HOV lane. Her defense: She’s pregnant, and her unborn child is a child, so she had two people in the car. Someone else posted in another story that military service may be up for question; if a fetus is deemed to be a child, pregnant women can’t serve in the military, because children can’t serve. I think cases like these are going to clog the courts and rightly so, I might add.
I’m going to file a lawsuit demanding that my age eligibility for Medicare be reduced by 9 months. I have a conception-day, not a birthday.
The voting age should be 17 years and 3 months old as well, or 18 years from your conception-day.
Emery, there are actually legitimate applications of passages like the 14th Amendment that will withstand strict scrutiny. Dobbs simply held that here is no penumbra of privacy so strong that the government cannot enact criminal laws in certain areas.
Regarding whether the state can declare life begins at conception, doesn’t “biology” mean anything to you? Sperm and eggs die in a couple of days (the egg in a day) if they’re not united, but when united live up to 120 years. It’s a pretty simple dichotomy.
The Washington Post has a story about a Texas woman who was ticketed for driving alone in the HOV lane. Her defense: She’s pregnant, and her unborn child is a child, so she had two people in the car.
In the interest of intellectual honesty and consistency, this specific instance also DIRECTLY equates with murdering a pregnant woman and getting charged with double homicide. If the baby is enough of a person that it can be considered “murdered”, it’s also enough of a person that it can be considered a distinct occupant of a motor vehicle.
However, I’m pretty sure the HOV lane case will be dismissed as ridiculous. Women would be required to show doctors’ notes indicating that they are indeed, pregnant, and therefore not breaking the traffic statute.