Posted on 05/06/2022 7:53:39 AM PDT by Kaslin
The only question for Roe v. Wade was when it would be overturned, not if.
Whatever your position on abortion is, Roe v. Wade is objectively bad law built upon fetid ground. With the shameful release of an early draft of an upcoming Supreme Court decision with Dobbs v. Jackson, we now know Roe will be overturned. Many on the left are freaking out over this decision, with much fearmongering coming from the media. However, the journalistic and political class is not telling people, as understood by liberal jurists like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that Roe was always weak law destined for the scrap heap of history.
Penumbras:
Roe v. Wade is the 1973 Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal and available by demand in the United States. The case came about after Norma L. McCorvey – Jane Roe was her alias – sued the state of Texas for stopping her from aborting her third child. Under Texas law, abortions could only happen in cases of rape, incest, or the life of the mother. The case eventually ended up in front of the US Supreme Court, which ruled in a shocking 7-2 decision, the majority opinion written by Judge Harry A. Blackmun, that the regulations on abortion were unconstitutional and that Roe’s right to privacy had been violated.
Here we find the first major flaw in Roe. Blackmun didn't just rule that the regulations were unconstitutional and leave it at that. He then created a new right to privacy out of whole cloth based on unspecified language while referring to the First, Fourth, Ninth, and 14th amendments. He used the standard created in the previous abortion case Griswold v. Connecticut, the dreaded so-called 'penumbras,' which means basing a constitutional right not on the text of the Constitution but on reasoning with general themes. This is a fatal flaw; American law is textual or basing law on what is written down. Putting the right to have an abortion in a fictitious "privacy zone" meant Roe got fated for big problems in its future.
I'm not saying this as a pro-life libertarian. Progressive activists and jurists have written at length about this weakness since the decision was made. Chiefly among them is progressive darling, SCOTUS Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg -or RBG, RIP- who believed Roe should have been built upon the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment instead of the fictitious one it was constructed upon. Ginsburg warned emphatically in a 1992 lecture that Roe “doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped, (as) experience teaches, may prove unstable.”
Trimesters & Silly Things:
Putting aside the constitutional fraud inherent to Roe, the mechanisms used to determine the legality of abortion regulations in the decision were themselves broken beyond repair. Blackmun created the Trimester Rule, where regulating abortion for the first trimester was always okay, sometimes allowable for the second, and the third almost always prohibited. This mechanism was constitutionally indefensible, and in 1992 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, SCOTUS tried to fix the problem by implementing the viability standard, meaning determining the limits on abortion regulations based on the earliest point a baby can be born and yet live.
In 1992 the viability standard was 24 weeks, the earliest average expectation then possible in the 1990s. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court said that this standard would change as medical technology improves. Today's viability is 21 weeks, a mountain of difference, and will continue to shrink over time. Meaning the right to an abortion is standing upon an ever-melting ice floe.
Roe came about from the lack of options for an unwanted child. Still, today there are myriad easier paths, including the Plan-B pill and Safe-Haven laws.
A Bottomless Pit:
When the Supreme Court supported Roe, it put the institution on a fatal political trajectory toward the iceberg that is the abortion issue. The US judicial branch should be independent and unaffected by popular opinion. Roe changed this, and not for the better.
Chief Justice Rehnquist warned that making the courts subject to popular opinion was a dangerous mistake that could destroy the institution: “Once the Court starts looking to the currents of public opinion regarding a particular judgment, it enters a truly bottomless pit from which there is simply no extracting itself.”
Or live by the sword, die by the sword. Roe and Casey were political judgments and thus subject to future political pressure when the winds of public opinion changed.
All the serious people, those in law, the media, universities, and politicians, have always understood that Roe was incredibly fragile. The only thing protecting it was their incessant threats and Stare De Crisis - “let the decision stand”- meaning the court's hesitancy to overturn historical precedence.
As Alito points out in Dobbs, US history is far more condemning of abortion than supportive. Therefore, the media and political class fought as hard as they have for the last five decades; because if an ounce of pressure to support Roe were removed, then the whole stack of cards, that is, the right to abortion, would come crashing down.
The Beginning
Ending Roe doesn't mean the end to the abortion question but a new beginning. Returning the issue to the states just as the Founders designed.
While I find abortion reprehensible in most cases, Democrats have little to fear over the change. As Reason reporter Jacob Sullum laid out in a recent article, removing Roe and enabling more abortion regulations will only lead to slight decreases in the number of abortions in the US. Abortion by telemedicine now accounts for 2/5th of all and will only increase. In blue states like New York, the removal of Roe will mean more access to abortion, not less.
For some, what will change is the access to late-stage abortion, a reprehensible practice primarily targeted at black families, just as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger always hoped.
However, for most women seeking out an abortion, accessing it in some form will remain available post Dobbs. This means friends, stop panicking and start persuading. The battle to determine abortion has only just begun.
Protesting in Catholic Churches on Mother’s Day and threatening SCOTUS and doxxing them is a great way to show how radical these demon vermin truly are.
BS sir.
Complete and total BS.
And if you are honest with yourself you know it.
Adoption was a clear and available option for any unwanted child.
And I just love how he points out how now you can just take a pill, that will cause any number of side effects, to kill your baby now and thinks that is an "option".
Good grief.
I believe, that the ‘battle against abortion’ is a lost battle. There will be limits, put in place in every state. Those limits, in my opinion, will end up being very close to one another as time goes on. I believe, after the initial ‘gasp’ on both the right and the left, we will likely come to some type of general understanding.
The most important thing, is that this finally returns the power to the people, and will force legislative branches of government to actually legislate law. The SCOTUS usurpation of people and legislative authority via a preposterous claim of ‘right to privacy’ was ludicrous.
Lets all grow up, discuss things in a reasonable fashion, and try to make difficult compromises and decisions, without vilifying each other for our thoughts and beliefs. Mostly, lets try to keep the Federal Government out and let the people decide.
Progressives see “emanations and penumbras” everywhere.
A man can have the aura of a woman. homosexuals can have a marriage. The 4th amendment covers the right to kill a baby.
Its cheap cover for their fascist social-engineering.
Roe was a departure from the rule of law. Activist judges were looking at short term results and ignored the damage they did to the doctrine of precedent. There are many reasons it should be reversed that have nothing to do with the immorality of abortion, not the least of which are stare decisis and the tenth amendment. The ethics of judicial restraint and following the law aren’t even taught in law school nor discussed in the legal community; it’s all just about serving one groups twisted notion of morality.
And of course, what about their other mantra, “a woman’s health”?
For women, there is nothing healthy about abortion, whether it is surgical or chemical. Nothing physically healthy and nothing psychologically or emotionally healthy.
This has been shown in many (suppressed) studies, and is just a matter of common sense, on top of that. But these “concerned” folk never talk about that.
I bet she's down in hell right now telling Ted Kennedy and Bobby Byrd--'see I told ya so!'
bump
“Stare De Crisis”?
None of this gets at the real heart of the matter: there’s still nothing that legally establishes the point at which a baby in utero gains full rights as a human being. We still have a mish-mash of inconsistent rules and laws from state to state that come to light only when a pregnant mother is killed or otherwise injured in a manner that kills her baby (i.e., the number of murder charges that are filed in response).
Still, I expect that the next legality to be litigated will be about the ‘rights’ of people to leave their home state to gain an abortion in a different state (and/or the ‘rights’ of someone assisting someone to do the same).
How true. I have a good friend who was raped in college. She had an abortion. Now at 52 she still cries about it and she wishes she had never done it. She calls me to come over and stay at her house at night sometimes because she is so depressed and she wants someone there to keep her from doing the unthinkable.
The Dem Marxists will lie like hell to get a radicalizing issue for Nov. 3rd.But they may be biting off more than “Gums” Biden can chew. That means that his handlers will have to chew for him....so the Marxist destabilization will accelerate.
This time federal buildings will be assaulted by hoards of screaming , barren women wearing pink vagina hats, rifles, torches, handguns and molotov cocktails? And the FBI will do nothing while these “protests” are labelled “peaceful” by the MSM and the likes of Nancy Pelosi?
Ruth Ginsberg was a Marxist Justice who hid herself well. She will haunt us for years and even though Ginsberg knew that Roe v Wade was bad law, and said so, she still provides emotional incitement to women who “looked like her.” And now they are about to turn violent like ANTIFA and BLM.
Who would want anything to do with these modern Hecates? We should can them and sent them to our enemies as weapons of mass destruction.They can depopulate a nation in a generation.
Imagine a crowd of them turning up after dark with Molotov cocktails and peacfully protesting at your home?
“Whatever your position on abortion is, Roe v. Wade is objectively bad law built upon fetid ground.”
He also emphasized that the simplest way for those in favor of abortion to make it legal nationwide was without Roe, by having a law passed by Congress and signed by the President. Needless to say, the libs didn’t like this one bit - even then, they were hypocritical bastards, loving “democracy” when it produced the results that they liked, hating it when it failed to do so.
I always come back to what King Solomon said some 3,000 years ago: “There’s nothing new under the Sun.” Human nature does not change, and the Leftists (of whatever label, flying whatever flag, etc.) are simply those who wish to enslave as many other people as possible, by any means possible. That accounts for their unashamed and in-your-face hypocrisy, both in my classroom in 1983 and now.
Democrats went from abortion should be “safe, rare and legal” to “the baby would be born and made comfortable....then the doctor and mother would have a discussion...”
I knew a lawyer many years ago who had worked for the ACLU. He resigned and went into private practice because he was so disgusted with their involvement in Roe. He could go on a long tirade as to why it was horrible ‘law’ - and that there was practically no LAW argued in it.
“For women, there is nothing healthy about abortion, whether it is surgical or chemical. Nothing physically healthy and nothing psychologically or emotionally healthy.”
I have noted to her and her husband (both of whom are against abortion, btw) that this reinforces the view that I had expressed to them months ago that her birth parents were decent people and would likely want to speak with her - after all, the mother could have had an abortion. But she (or they together) decided not to do that, to let their child live even if they were not ready to take care of her, and that this spoke to a certain baseline decency and morality. I also pointed out the obvious to them, with an eye toward other members of the family who are quite liberal, that without that decision, she and her children (and their descendants, forever) would never have lived. I look forward to future family meetings when the topic comes up - I am going to utterly slam those in favor of abortion with a very concrete example that is right in their midst.
That lawyer found out what many have (and what many on the Left purposely ignore), which is that the ACLU is a Marxist, America-hating, organization masquerading as a civil rights group. They pretend to back ALL civil rights, but in reality only back those that advance the Leftist agenda. One need only look at their stance on the 2nd Amendment to see that - here’s an explicitly reserved right which they deny exists, vs. the non-existent “right” to an abortion that appears nowhere at all in the Constitution or in our prior law.
You can tell that a person is intellectually and morally honest when they can see organizations like the ACLU (and NOW, for that matter) for the utterly hypocritical and manipulative organizations that they are.
Taking a leak on this baby murdering shrew’s grave is on my bucket list.
The ?Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments effectively prohibit abortion.
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