As much as I hate to admit it, the apparently successful 50-year crusade to reverse Roe v Wade isn’t about protecting children or even babies.
It’s about controlling women. and always has been.
When Roe gave American women the right to safe and legal abortions in 1973, guess what other unrelated right they got a year later.
The right to have a credit card without a man cosigning on it.
We are highly critical of Muslims for the way they regard women as second-class citizens in their countries, but it hasn’t been all that long since many of the same restrictions were in effect in this country.
We tend to act as if there are certain questions that aren’t even debatable.
When life begins, for instance.
Fundamentalist Christians say it’s obviously. at the moment of conception, that li’l sperm and li’l egg become l’il zygote, which becomes li’l fetus which becomes li’l baby if left alone to develop.
Except for l’il miscarriage and li’l stillbirth?
Well, in Judaism, life begins when a newborn draws its first successful breath.
If you read Samuel Alito’s first draft, it is troubling in many ways, not the least of which is an emphasis on states’ rights in an era when there are fewer and fewer reasons for there even to be states.
And of course, ignoring stare decisis is fairly significant too. The idea that something has been settled law for 50 years and then be taken away, especially after being further enshrined if narrowed a bit 30 years ago by the Casey decision.
All three of the justices nominated by Donald Trump lied in their confirmation hearings about considering the value of precedent, although anyone who thought+ they wouldn’t repeal Roe if the chance came was either stupid or Susan Collins.
They will think of themselves as heroes, as will the hard-core anti-abortion types. But the fact that the greatest outrage on the right is over the leaking of the draft speaks volumes.
It certainly doesn’t mean the hard-core fundies will pack their tents, either. Do you really think they won’t go after same-sex marriage? Or transgender rights? Or, since established law doesn’t seem to matter anymore, how about a decision from six years prior to Roe? Why should states that don’t want to recognize interracial marriages have to abide by Loving v Virginia (1967).
+Before we spend too much time worrying about the Supreme Court’s reputation and a decline in jurisprudence, the fact is there have been plenty of other times that the court has been on the wrong side of reality.
Take 1857. In what is almost universally regarded as the worst decision ever, the Court ruled in Dred Scott v Sanford that African-Americans, no matter where they lived or whether they were free or enslaved, could not be American citizens or have the rights of citizens.
It’s why Chief Justice Roger B. Taney is considered the worst ever to hold that position and it was at least one of the causes of the Civil War.
Or take Buck v Bell in 1927, a ruling that has never been reversed in which the Court said states could legally force sterilization on those with intellectual disabilities. It wasn’t Taney, either. The 8-1 decision was written by the great Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
The year 1896 gave us Plessy v Ferguson, telling us that “separate that equal” was fine and essentially legalizing Jim Crow lawas for more than half a century.
Don’t forget Korematsu v United States (1944), the one that said that interning American citizens just because they were of Japanese descent was perfectly legal. After all, don’t you know there’s a war on?
Read this piece in FindLaw for plenty of other ones. Sadly, the Supreme Court has often tended to support the powerful in maintaining the status quo. Sort of like the Grammy Awards were in the ’60s, when in the first year the Beatles were nominated, the winners were “The Girl from Ipanema” for record of the year and “Hello Dolly” for song of the year.
Of course, the issue here is far more important than whether rock ‘n’ roll got its props back in the day.
The issue here is whether our society can survive with unreconcilable differences on such an important issue. The fact is that the true believers on either side will never accept compromise.
And if it really is true that more than 70 percent of Americans do not believe Roe should be overturned, we are in for interesting times.
Just as Ronald Reagan once said the loss of freedom was potentially more than a generation away, it’s beginning to look like the battle for women’s rights will never be permanently won.
And that is very sad.