An Abortion Crossroads at the Supreme Court. The Court must consider the Constitution and long-time precedent.

Wall Street Journal ^ | November 30, 2021 | WSJ Editorial Board

[karpov]

The Supreme Court takes up its most important abortion case in years on Wednesday, and the question will be how the Justices maneuver their way out of a thicket they should never have entered 50 years ago. Will the Court, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, settle for an incremental ruling that upholds a Mississippi ban on abortion after 15 weeks, or will it overturn its misguided precedents and return the regulation of abortion to legislatures in the states?

These columns have long supported a policy of legal abortion before viability, albeit uneasily as technology has revealed the development of the fetus. But we have had no hesitation in saying that Roe v. Wade (1973) and its progeny, notably Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), were wrongly decided. Abortion is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, and its regulation is a classic example of police powers reserved for the states.

Roe in particular is one of the worst decisions in the Court’s history, on par with Plessy v. Ferguson (“separate but equal” on race) and Korematsu (internment camps for Japanese-Americans). At a stroke, the Court overturned 50 state laws and turned abortion into a pitched political battle that nonetheless could not be settled politically through the ballot box.

As the great legal scholar Alexander Bickel wrote in “The Morality of Consent,” the Court simply invented a trimester medical analysis. “One is left to ask why. The Court never said. It refused the discipline to which its function is properly subject. It simply asserted the result it reached.”

That mistake has distorted American politics and law for a half century. It has heightened political polarization and made the Supreme Court a partisan battlefield. With nowhere else to turn, abortion foes have looked to the Court for redress

[ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas]

Somehow same-sex couples are protected by the 14th amendment but polygamiststs are not.

[DoodleDawg]

Somehow same-sex couples are protected by the 14th amendment but polygamiststs are not.

If Roe falls then maybe someone will challenge Obergfell?

[ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas]

Maybe. One difference is that polygamists are not as likely to come out of the closet, while the non-heterosexuals have parades, abound in the media, and are not afraid of being doxxed.
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[DoodleDawg]

One difference is that polygamists are not as likely to come out of the closet, while the non-heterosexuals have parades, abound in the media, and are not afraid of being doxxed.

Polygamists are also not a protected class where homosexuals are in most states.

[ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas]

That is arguably partly a result of not fighting for themselves in the first place, but if so they likely would have been crushed by the elites and media. Even though a kind of “serial polygamy” via divorce and remarriage is quite common. I’ll bet you already knew Elizabeth Taylor married Richard Burton twice plus 6 others.