It has been a LONG time since my one-semester high school law class, so I could be remembering wrong, but didn’t the Roe vs Wade decision say that the right to privacy was implied in the constitution, and that that was why the government had no business deciding women couldn’t get abortions?
If so, does overturning it mean that SCOTUS no longer believes that Americans have a constitutional right to privacy?
Don’t get me wrong, I think abortion is an abomination and I pray it ends, permanently!
At the same time, eliminating the assumed right to privacy opens the doors to yet another layer of government overreach.
No. That was the interesting thing on the original opinion. It was never firmly decided on any constitutional principle. The “privacy” argument came in a judges argument about ‘in the shadow of a penumbra’(Wtf that means) that could be interpreted, under the right circumstances, as an occasional right to privacy. Part of what made Roe so inane was its lack of basis in anything having to do with them constitution given that the main job of the Supreme Court is to determine the viability of a law when reviewing its constitutionality. It was unfortunately a political decision without a basis in constitutionality (at least in reading through their decision). Though I think life and death matters fall outside the realm of privacy arguments and should be decided by society at large, it might have been interesting had they based their argument in something plausibly solid. It was a political decision given a patchwork argument for cover 😉
There was never a constitutional basis for Roe, as Justice Blackmun himself admitted. In fact, one could argue that the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments require an abortion ban.