Posted on 05/17/2019 7:29:31 AM PDT by topher
January 22, 2015 marked the forty-second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, in which the Court interpreted the Constitution as mandating that all states must allow abortion-on-demand (until fetal viability). In so ruling, the Court instantly gave America the most radical pro-abortion law in the world. The unwritten “constitutional” right to choose abortion as mandated by the Supreme Court is virtually absolute. States cannot directly or indirectly impede access to abortion.
The right invented by the Roe Court is not, as it is often described, a right to have an abortion in the first trimester, but it is an absolute right to choose to have an abortion for any reason, or for no reason, at least until the fetus is viable (which Justice Blackmun told us, occurs usually about 28 weeks gestation – that’s nearly 7 months into the term of pregnancy). Even after viability, most abortion regulations are prohibited or suspended if they impinge the woman’s access to abortion for any reason that can be characterized by a self-serving abortionist as useful for to the mother’s health. Thus, the Supreme Court even invalidated state laws restricting the use of late-term Nazi-esque “partial-birth abortion” (more accurately, partial birth “infanticide”). Fortunately, Congress pushed back, and the Court upheld federal legislation restricting such gruesome late-term abortion methods.
Only two significant restrictions on abortion have been upheld. First, restrictions on public funding have been upheld – after dozens of lawsuits by Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics, and at least four separate Supreme Court decisions, it is finally clear that the SCOTUS will not interpret the Constitution to require the government to pay for elective abortions. Second, it is now clear that states can require parental notice or consent if the pregnant girl is a minor, but parental consent must be subject to judicial bypass, and studies in several states have shown that when an abortion clinic goes to court to ask judicial permission to allow them to perform an abortion on a minor for any reason, they get the court approval in over 99% of the cases (it is a rubber stamp). So even parental notice in most states is simply a phantom, a mere pretense and legal fiction.
Roe made American abortion law the most extreme in the world. As Professor Mary Ann Glendon has observed, compared to any country in Europe, East or West, we still would not find any country where there is so little restriction on abortion in principle as there is in the United States. . . . Today, in order to find a country where the legal approach to abortion is as indifferent to unborn life as it is in the United States, we have to look to countries which are much less comparable to us politically, socially, culturally and economically, and where concerns about population overrides both women’s liberty and fetal life. Mary Ann Glendon, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law 2, 24 (1987).
In Roe, the Supreme Court constitutionalized private violence. Abortion is the most violent act one human can commit against another (killing). The primary direct victims of abortion are the most voiceless, vulnerable class of human beings (in utero).
Roe v. Wade is the 20th Century equivalent of Dred Scott v. Sanford – the infamous decision holding that slaves and their descendants were not and could not be “citizens” of any American state for purposes of the Constitution. Conceptually, the Roe abortion rule is like slavery; it de-humanizes and treats as chattel a whole class of humanity. As Dred Scott held that Blacks not persons entitled to constitutional protection, so Roe holds that unborn humans are not entitled to basic constitutional protection for their lives. As the Court in Dred Scott said that Black slaves are merely the property of their owners, so Roe said that an unborn human being is merely property belonging to her pregnant mother – which the woman can dispose of as she wishes. If, as Abraham Lincoln said at Coopers Union, the message of slavery is that a man is not a man if he is Black, the core message of Roe is that a human being is not a human being if she is in utero.
Roe abandoned women to their privacy, turning the age-old retort of male sexual predators – “It’s your problem, you take care of it,” into a constitutional mandate. Roe portrayed an entire generation of women as irresponsible, inferior, inept, unable to represent themselves in democratic political processes and in constant need of the “paternalism” of a rigid constitutional rule of abortion-on-demand – preventing states from restriction elective abortions. Roe presents women as incapable of dealing compassionately or creatively with unexpected pregnancies, except by the violence of abortion.
It is appropriate for Americans to take time in January to reflect on the tragic wrongs of Roe v. Wade. Our laws were distorted by Roe; our Constitution (both principles and processes) was distorted by Roe; our values of democratic self-government were distorted by Roe; and millions of lives of unborn children in utero (now approaching 60 million lives) have been destroyed because of Roe. It is time not merely to mourn for those wrongs, but it is time to correct them. It is time – past time – to constitutionally repudiate the tragic wrongs of Roe v. Wade.
This analogy is very important...
I have heard PROPAGANDA from the likes of NBC and other TV that abortion is a CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT...
Actually Roe V Wade was hundreds, no, millions of times worse.
Dred Scott was correct based on the Constitution and law of the time.
Roe V Wade was manufactured out of whole cloth.
Roe v. Wade is the 20th Century equivalent of Dred Scott v. Sanford – the infamous decision holding that slaves and their descendants were not and could not be “citizens” of any American state for purposes of the Constitution. Conceptually, the Roe abortion rule is like slavery; it de-humanizes and treats as chattel a whole class of humanity. As Dred Scott held that Blacks not persons entitled to constitutional protection, so Roe holds that unborn humans are not entitled to basic constitutional protection for their lives. As the Court in Dred Scott said that Black slaves are merely the property of their owners, so Roe said that an unborn human being is merely property belonging to her pregnant mother – which the woman can dispose of as she wishes. If, as Abraham Lincoln said at Coopers Union, the message of slavery is that a man is not a man if he is Black, the core message of Roe is that a human being is not a human being if she is in utero.
The IDIOT Left is putting out so much false junk because of the Alabama decision that the similarity between these two Supreme Court cases NEEDS to Highlighted!
Dred Scott wound up needing a Constitutional amendment to overturn. Roe v. Wade may need the same.
Roe V Wade was manufactured out of whole cloth.
Dred Scott decision is one man's opinion with little basis in Constitutional reality. Roe v. Wade isn't much different.
Actually the Dred Scott case was an honest finding that the US Constitution did not interpret the circumstances of slaves to confer citizenship
Less emotion, more legal interpretation
That’s why it was a 7-2 decision by men who were not slavers
Chief Justice Roger Taney himself “ inherited” slaves as part of his family holdings but freed them, with pensions , upon his death
The 3/5 formula was derived by men oppposed to slavery, who wanted to dilute the voting power of Southern states with many slaves, preventing them from using their population figures to vote to keep slavery
The recourse for Dred Scott and others in his situation was amendment of the Constitution to insert language specifically recognizing their status, which could have occurred peacefully but instead, occurred only after a civil war triggered by the struggle to preserve states’s powers vs the federal govt
Dred Scott was a 7-2 decision
The left has no problem with 3/5 rule as they chop up babies after abortion and sell the parts.
But the decision was written by one man. And the extent to which Taney wandered from the underlying issue at hand was pretty excessive.
Except for the fact that the Dred Scott decision had a stronger constitutional foundation than did Roe v Wade.
Roe v Wade is just made up law. Dred Scott was actually based on Constitutional law.
No it doesn't, because it's made up phoney baloney law from beginning to end.
Oh, and it's based on the "Penumbra" from the 14th amendment.
The badly written and dubiously passed 14th amendment is responsible for more overreach by courts than any other part of the US Constitution.
I agree with everything you wrote but this. It was simply impossible to amend the US Constitution to abolish slavery at any meaningful future time period from the 1860s. If Lincoln's efforts to pass the Corwin amendment had been successful, it would have been virtually impossible to abolish slavery at all.
Slavery could not be legally abolished in the 19th century, and if people are honest about what happened with the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, it wasn't legally abolished back then either.
I’ll say it once I’ll say it again enough with the slavery an abortion analogies they are nothing absolutely nothing similar at all
On this I will agree with you. Taney expanded his commentary way beyond what was legally valid. Black people were citizens of states under the Declaration of Independence, and so therefore Taney was just wrong about that.
But the Dred Scott decisions was constitutionally valid at the time.
As is Roe v. Wade. Unless the Constitution is amended or a future court overturns it.
I read the Roe decision. I challenge anyone to explain the smoke and college reefer philosophy that passed for a judicial decision.
In that case , every USSC decision is a one man decision
The amendment would not have been to abolish slavery, but to widen the definition of inhabitants who could claim US citizenship and therefore Constitutional protection
Imagine what would have happened historically if Taney had just legislated from the bench and de facto naturalized the entire population of slaves
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