And yes the eventual reversal of Roe may not be declared as such. I don't believe Brown v. BOE technically overturned Plessy, but that was the effect.
I hope, but do not know, that Roberts will be there with us at every step.
Judge Roberts has been a pretty consistent advocate for allowing state legislators to legislate. I think he will vote to uphold state bans on partial-birth abortion, parental consent laws, waiting period laws, and other laws narrowing abortion rights. The vast majority of mildly liberal, "pro-choice" women will not care about these votes, although NARAL will scream. Eventually there will be a challenge to a state law that allows the Court to finally overturn Roe. Remember, the Court cannot just announce they are vacating Roe. They have to get a case that allows them to do it.
Dear dubyaismypresident,
"The house of Roe will be dismantled one room at a time the path is thus Stenberg, then Casey, then Doe, then Roe."
Maybe. I think it's more likely that we'll see some sort of historical discontinuity, and Roe will either be voided or in some way made entirely irrelevant. Looking forward, we always try to project what has happened into what will happen. And if we want the status quo to change, we think about reasonable ways and steps that it could change, and decide that's what will happen.
But history very often betrays our sense of reasonableness.
Lots of folks in the early 19th century thought that eventually slavery would fade away. It didn't. Rather, it was swept away by a discontinuous historical event - the Civil War.
It's an open question whether slavery, or when slavery might have ended without that discontinuous event, but history is clear that it certainly would not have been in the mid-1860s. I've seen some analyses that suggest it would have lasted until the early part of the 20th century, or even to the middle of the 20th century. I don't know.
Anyway, my own view is that with grave cultural and societal injustices like this, the dissonant energy created by the injustice makes it far more likely that some sort of singular event, some sort of dramatic, fast shift in the societal tectonic plates leads to a rapid change, rather than a slow, orderly, non-chaotic political process.
A clean overturning of Roe by the Supreme Morons would permit a path to a more orderly process of gradual change. The failure to overturn Roe by the Court will eventually lead to discontinuous, rapid, jarring, painful change.
sitetest