I don't know why you're being downvoted. What you're saying is exactly correct. That's what this ruling affirms: it is a state issue. Abortion is not in the US Constitution and many - even left-leaning - legal scholars have said Roe v Wade was ruled incorrectly.
I downvoted it because it's hopelessly naive and incorrect. This does not return the power to the states, it gives the power to the State to prevent people from having access to reproductive healthcare. Every American just had rights stripped away.
The second that Republicans have a majority in Congress and the Presidency, they will pass a federal ban on abortion in all the states.
SCOTUS just ruled that no, laws that ban abortion aren't unconstitutional. There is already precedent and practice of the Federal government to regulate healthcare, the power to make specific crimes against children federal, or any number of various ways they could argue the Federal government has the power to ban abortion.
The members of the Court that claim to be pick and choose which material they're originalist or textualist regarding, particularly in this case. Others are just idealogues nominated and confirmed to be political tools of the Republican party. You should not have faith in them, their credibility is shot.
Not entirely sure how this phenomenon is called, but we live in times where we no longer speak the same language. On purpose. Which facet of reality are we going to emphasize? Which facet of reality are we going to deny, excising it from language itself?
"reproductive healthcare", correct.
"mothers killing their own babies in the womb", also correct.
We don't do that with other state laws like murder and theft. And different states have different ideas on what those laws should look like too.
EDIT: I'm not sure what you mean by that. Are you upset about SCOTUS citing common law tradition? Most of our law works that way, you have to build on something. Even "reason" needs axioms and you have to find a way to pick those.
EDIT2: There are a surprising number of people who want to decriminalize theft and even murder in some situations (look up "mutual combat" in Chicago.)
Abortion is not murder or theft. An appropriate comparison would be an appendectomy. If states started banning appendectomies, I would hope the fed would codify it as law.
That framing begs the question. Virtually everyone agrees murder and theft should be crimes. There is vast philosophical disagreement on whether abortion should be a crime. You can believe it is murder, but the majority of Americans disagree. Ultimately, it should be up to the pregnant person to weigh the morality of that decision, not the government.
> Virtually everyone agrees [...] theft should be crimes
Wasn't there just a thread here a few days ago that had a bunch of people arguing that the decriminalization of shoplifting in San Francisco is a good thing?
Because the state went through a democratic process and decided to do that. Democracy doesn't mean that everyone has to vote for the policies you like.
Ahh, so any democratic process that results in a policy you don't like is 1930's Germany. While any democratic process that results in a policy you do like is... ?
aah, so as long as something happened though a democratic process it's fine and dandy and no examination is needed as to the possible consequences of that decision?
1930s Germany had no democratic tradition so it's unsurprising that a reactionary conservative movement resulted in a dictator. That is absolutely not the case here, our republic is an enormous part of our tradition so it's extremely unlikely that such a movement here would have the same result.
Also if you keep calling conservatives Nazis eventually they might start wondering why, they might start remembering and noticing things you'd rather they forget.
"We have decided that rich people who can travel to a different state have different rights than poor people" is a very bad process.
That's the difference between rights and privileges -- As of this week I can't vote away your your right to carry concealed weapon in my city, but you can vote to take away my access to abortion, or even contraception in yours?
OP is saying SCOTUS doesn't make abortion impossible (ruling that it is always tantamount to murder and thus never permissible). A ban would prohibit states from allowing abortion, and this isn't the case.
SCOTUS has said that states may decide how to regulate it. Individual states will either ban, or not, as their constituents wish.
Yes. As I understand it, Roe vs Wade argued that a right to abortion was implied by the constitution, and thus such a right was created implicitly, rather than by the explicit passing of legislation.
The next step is clearly to advocate for explicit legislation.
I mean… let’s not act like the 2nd amendment is interpreted in any serious way.
The Supreme Court invented a personal right to bear arms from a 250 year old amendment during my lifetime and is now not only ignoring words that are in there but adding words that aren’t
Anyone trying to apply logic to this is just facilitating nonsense because these decision are based in ideology not logic. Don’t launder it for them.
Except for all those constitutional rights... Freedom of religion being one, and their are at least two recognized religions where abortion is a religious right.
So there you go, freedom for Christian's not for anyone else, a good Christian nation! /s
No it practically has not, the republicans would immediately filibuster any attempt. And they will keep doing so by locking in enough states which means that the majority of the American people can vote what they want, it wouldn't change a thing.
The Supreme court enforced slavery - and virtually ensured that the civil war would occur when it expanded slavery with Dredd Scott. (On the basis of something not in the constitution). The legislative made it illegal and changed the constitution. This opens the same path to legislatures. Hopefully without the civil war that occurred because the Supreme court played a role in preserving slavery.
It leaves it up to the states now because there is no meaningful federal code on the matter. The underpinnings of the decision allow for a federal ban since it's just saying that there's no inherent constitutional protection.
Interestingly: The NYT link was written 4 hours ago (~6AM EST) - but the decision seems to have been released around ~10AM EST. I suppose everyone expected this post the leak.
Without taking any side on this issue: this is a tough day in America, when a 50-year precedent is overturned.
The parallel is that they were both Supreme Court cases that had their rulings overturned years later, and in both, a lot of people liked the original decision and were upset that it no longer stood.
“Both Hitler and Obama were disliked by millions of people”
Same energy. This ruling today has more in common with Dred Scott (reduces citizens back down to property because of founder intent or something) than the overturning of it.
It's not the undermining of precedent (for its own sake) that matters here. It's the contents of the precedent that are presumably bothersome to the upthread poster. Comparisons to precedents overturned in the name of progress are entirely reasonable to examine whether its the matter of precedents in general or specific contents that are issue.
That’s the bad faith part. This has nothing to do with precedence and the current Supreme Court will do what it wants and invent new and incoherent forms of logic as needed to do so.
Dred Scott v. Sandford was a landmark supreme court case that, among other things, denied people of African descent US citizenship. The Chief Justice Taney believed it would finally end the debate around slavery in the US, instead it inflamed controversy that eventually led to civil war.
Perhaps the grandparent was suggesting that was a likely outcome here as well?
I believe that pre-writing articles for both sides of major binary decisions and only releasing the one that turns out to be correct is standard practice at large news organisations, where the value of being first to publish is far higher than the cost of writing two articles.
Unrelated: A journalist friend told me that their (very big) media firm started writing obituaries of the public figures as soon as they landed in hospital and were old.
There were many (tens) obituaries written for the people who went to live on for more years or are are still living.
Id imagine for important news it would be easy enough to just write two articles and release the correct one, especially if your main concern is being first to publish
We very thankfully have more options for women that are much safer than coat hangers.
There are drugs that will allow women to have illegal abortions that are much much safer than a coat hanger. The important factor will be finding ways to get such drugs to women in states where they cannot be legally used, and ensuring that such a delivery mechanism delivers safe, and authentic drugs.
so basically corner meth dealers will now deliver abortion pills? IDK if thats gonna last, because you know we can always police the drugs out of the system.
A lot of fairly common prescription drugs are abortifaciants. Prostaglandin is the substance used in drugs designed for that specific purpose, but many drugs that influence muscle control, inflamation, or bloodflow can do the same thing.
It's going to be very difficult to regulate all of these drugs.
Well, I hope we can find systems that avoid it being dangerous.
For example, pills can be acquired safely from outside of the jurisdiction and mailed in.
Or, many such pills have on-label uses that are not abortion related. So there could be avenues to helping people who need them for abortion purposes obtain them from reputable providers for legal purposes.
But, yes, the war on drugs has shown that trying to police drugs out of the system is incredibly difficult.
I'd just like to make sure that, once the war ramps up, we can find ways to keep the delivery of the drugs as timely, authentic, and the use of them as safe as possible.
As expected, the 5 justices on the leaked Alito opinion constitute the majority, Chief Justice Roberts filed a concurring opinion (in which he argues that the principle of judicial restraint requires merely upholding the law in question, not overturning Roe), and the 3 liberal justices dissented.
In total, the opinions are 217 pages long.
Anyone able to quickly run a diff on the leaked majority opinion and the official one?
From 1973 until 2022, the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was officially deemed by the Supreme Court to be a Constitutional protection of abortion. The idea that "most legal scholars agree" is pretty silly; there's been significant debate for decades.
"In a solo concurring opinion, Thomas says the court should reconsider rulings that protect contraception, same-sex relationships, and same-sex marriage."
These are next up on the chopping block and the same logic used to overturn Roe v Wade can be used to overturn those. Thomas is merely voicing that reality instead of playing coy like other reactionary justices.
Take heart! The majority ruling explicitly says that its reasoning does not apply to those, and goes into detail about why those rulings are different.
You're right. i posted the wrong article. The point of that article is that abortion was so widespread and unregulated that most founders wouldn't even think it worth their time to write down their opinion about it.
For reference, his opinion stated "we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents", while:
> Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was a landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Equal protection is not substantive due process. Gay marriage & interracial marriage are on far firmer ground because of the right to "equal protection of the laws". Not that the conservative wing won't try but they're going to have to torture logic to do it.
Substantive due process is far shakier. It's Justices deciding what rights they think people should have and then working backwards as best they can to justify them. The back to back gun rights & abortion rulings lays it bare. There's just no intellectually honest way of finding a right to an abortion but not a right to bear arms.
IMHO, the substantive due process was the wrong way about this. It was a shaky foundation and as more rights were found the logic got shakier. They should have used the right to peacefully assemble and based most of these substantive due process cases on them.
They just tortured logic in the past few days. They removed Roe because they decided that amendments that have been interpreted for decades to give people the right to privacy don't actually do that textually at the same time that they struck down a NY law because they claim that people have the right to defend themselves, which is nowhere to be found anywhere in the Constitution.
Only District of Columbia v. Heller decided that the right to bear arms was independent of an official militia. No doubt such ruling could eventually be overturned by SCOTUS if they so choose.
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Please point out the part of that amendment that references the right of people to have concealed carry for the purposes of self defense. Because it seems to me that they tried to be as obtuse and textualist as can possibly be with regards to Roe, but apparently the second amendment grants all sorts of rights that don't actually exist in the Constitution.
In Thomas's mind, one has long-standing historical precedence where the other doesn't.
Interracial marriage has existed for pretty much all of human history (though race as a concept likely didn't, at least not the way it is perceived in modern times). Heck you even have Moses marrying an Ethiopian woman and his siblings spoke out against him over it and were punished by God for it (see Numbers chapter 12).
Gay marriage, on the other hand, has near zero historical precedence outside of a few cases with Roman emperors and stuff like that.
Well... we actually have a constitutional amendment directly banning slavery, and no such amendment for interracial marriages which are never mentioned constitutionally. It's easy to resolve from a purely constitutional perspective.
From a purely judicial perspective, slavery is explicitly abolished in the US Constitution, via amendment.
The approach that Thomas favors is "text, history, and tradition". The words - as written - taken in light of what the author(s) intended and what was happening at the time.
And laws against sodomy have... you guessed it... long-standing historical precedence. Though in the case of sodomy laws banning it aren't as historically universal as the practice of interracial marriage was.
The "it wasn't invented at the time they wrote the Constitution, so the Constitution doesn't apply to it" argument has been debunked long ago. Otherwise, freedom of speech would only apply to parchment and quill pens. The whole point of a court is to interpret the Constitution with new facts and situations that arise.
Originalism was rejected by the court for the longest time, but we have since appointed new judges to the court who don't reject those arguments. They used originalist arguments to overturn the NYC gun ban yesterday.
"The whole point of a court is to interpret the Constitution with new facts and situations that arise."
You're describing the "living constitution"[1] view, which has not been the dominant position among Supreme Court justices for some time.
Now they're all "strict constructionists"[2], who think the opposite of what you describe: that the constitution should be interpreted just as it was written.
Just to be clear, no SCOTUS case has yet stated that citizens are entitled to own fully automatic firearms, and it seems to me exceedingly unlikely that they would. Heller talks about how to decide what kinds of firearms can be prohibited, and strongly indicates that you can't ban 9mm handguns because they are the most popular firearm for self-defense and so on. It's hard to see how one can extend Heller and this case to say that you cannot prohibit fully automatic firearms.
The constitution was written in 1787. Guns were all muzzle loaded at that time. The automatic/semi-automatic distinction is meaningless to the constitution. Why would it draw a line at automatic and not at post 1820 percussion cap weapons?
And laws against abortion have existed for most of human history as well. Most haven't been outright bans on it, but there have been plenty of rules about who can get them and how all the way back to Hammurabi.
> Most haven't been outright bans on it, but there have been plenty of rules about who can get them and how all the way back to Hammurabi.
This sounds like it needs a source.
As far as I understand, anti-abortion laws started getting traction in the 1800s. Before that, these were scattered and mostly religious inspired. Also, Hammurabi doesn't make any references to voluntary abortions.
"The “eminent common-law authorities (Blackstone, Coke, Hale, and the like),” Kahler v. Kansas, 589 U. S. ___, ___ (2020) (slip op., at 7), all describe abortion after quickening as criminal. Henry de Bracton’s 13th-century treatise explained that if a person has “struck a pregnant woman, or has given her poison, whereby he has caused abortion, if the foetus be already formed and animated, and particularly if it be animated, he commits homicide.” 2 DeLegibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae 279 (T. Twiss ed. 1879); see also 1 Fleta, c. 23, reprinted in 72 Selden Soc. 60–61 (H. Richardson & G. Sayles eds. 1955) (13th-century
treatise)."
They go on for a few pages going over common law before discussing the historical record in the US.
Ignoring the fact that originalism as practiced is an embarrassing judicial philosophy,
> Interracial marriage has existed for pretty much all of human history
is not the answer to the question originalism is asking. It asks whether there is a historical precedence for protecting that action as a right.
You don't need to look any farther than this very ruling! Abortion has been practiced since the beginning recorded history (and likely much longer) and books like the bible even instruct you on how to perform one. That history has no bearing on Alito or Thomas.
>books like the bible even instruct you on how to perform one
Not really, that depends on which translation of Numbers 5 you're looking at. It's not clear at all that the "Ordeal of Bitter Water" was supposed to induce a miscarriage.
If GP is in fact referring to the sotah, then it would contradict their argument even more because it is explicitly the husband having power over the woman's body without needing her consent or even any justifying evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordeal_of_the_bitter_water
to be clear, its pretty irrelevant to the argument because the bible is just one such example of the history of abortion. There are hundreds more and if it would help you can pretend I mentioned one of those instead.
> In Thomas's mind, one has long-standing historical precedence where the other doesn't.
That would be an anomaly in setting judicial precedent. If legal precedent was formally acknowledged for historical reasons, then we would be having a really long conversation on civil rights, _all_ civil rights.
And the issue may not be gay marriage, but straight up sodomy laws, which were introduced as religious inspired laws, most extensively Judeo-Christian. For these to stand, we would need to ignore the separation of church and state.
It's an interesting sub-case of Dunning-Kruger that people with consciences and integrity try to shame people like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito about hypocrisy. They project onto them attributes they do not care about; their logic is that Loving impacts Thomas and Griswold, Olbergefell, and Lawrence do not. They dislike gay people and feminists, and things that hurt them are good. Things that hurt them are bad. Just look at the stunning hypocrisy on Bruen. It says in plain English: "well regulated militia", and they can't infer a right to regulate firearms by states there... but they can't find a right for a basic medical procedure in the Due Process Clause. I'm not being uncharitable, just read the majority decision. They can't hide behind inconsequential dissents now, their shitty jurisprudence is front and center. They can't argue on merits, so they appeal to a prior history that never existed. It is an embarrassing episode for those of us that follow Supreme Court decisions, and it's a tragic episode for those whose human rights they are taking away (and their loved ones).
Equal protection cannot protect that which is unequal. For example, I doubt an equal protection challenge to unequal lengths of maternity / paternity leave would stand, given the obvious difference in what's happening. The sexes, when it comes to things like business participation and innovation, may be equal in ability. However, if one views marriage as a precursor to reproduction -- the historical view of marriage -- then it's quite clear that the sexes are not equal, whereas the races (for whatever conception of race you have) are.
It has been abundantly clear to everyone that a black man can impregnate a white woman. And a black woman can have children with a white man. If this act (reproduction) is what marriage is about, then the sexes are not equal, and thus not worthy of equal protection. A man cannot impregnate a man. Whereas, any race can impregnate / be impregnated by any other race as far as we can tell.
If you have evidence to the contrary (that both sexes are identical when it comes to reproduction, which is the historical view of marriage Thomas may adhere to; or that various races cannot interbreed), then please do share.
By this logic, should marriage between a man and a woman who cannot conceive be protected? Why or why not?
> However, if one views marriage as a precursor to reproduction -- the historical view of marriage...
The historical purpose of marriage is the exchange/pursuit of status and resources[1]. Reproduction was an inevitable outcome of lack of contraceptives. The idea of reproduction being the primary purpose of marriage is pretty recent.
'Cannot conceive' is a difficult definition, since you can't know until you've tried in many circumstances. Historically in the West, consummation of the marriage rendered it permanent. But anyway.
Historically, and actually still today, if you have actual reasons you can't conceive (for example, if a man cannot get an erection due to permanent and incurable impotence), then yes, the marriage can be declared anulled. Annulment is different from divorce because it makes it such that the marriage never existed at all at anytime. In other words, yes, certain conditions preventing conception can be used to claim that a marriage was fraudulent.
In certain legal jurisdictions, a castrated man cannot marry. While that may not always be true today, it has been the case historically. Prior to the modern day, people did operate under the assumption that those who certainly could not conceive could not marry, but of course, they didn't have the full understanding of conception we do.
> The historical purpose of marriage is the exchange/pursuit of status and resources
Yes, and the purpose of status and resources is to pass those along to your children. Also your article mainly talks about 'love' and marriage not reproduction.
> The idea of reproduction being the primary purpose of marriage is pretty recent.
This is completely baseless. Thomas Aquinas writes about the purpose of marriage as being for procreation. Given that at the time he wrote he represented an organization that represented the majority of moral thought in Europe... it's hard to actually believe these ridiculous claims. Moreover, status and resources were the main pursuit of the rich. The poor still married... usually for kids.
> It would seem that the "sacrament" is not the chief of the marriage goods. For the end is principal in everything. Now the end of marriage is the offspring. Therefore the offspring is the chief marriage good.
Given that Aquinas is also pulling from historical sources (in this cases the Sentences by Peter Lombard), it's extremely likely this idea -- written very clearly in the 13th century -- originated well before then. What's modern is the claim that the chief aim of marriage in previous centuries was status / resources. Everyone in previous centuries understood that the way in which marriage produced those goods was children. A woman from one family marrying into another noble family would have little claim over her new status if the couple were unable to produce offspring. If a man had no offspring to inherit, the status and resources would end.
MORE SOURCES FROM EVEN EARLIER
In the 5th century, Augustine of Hippo clearly indicates in his treatise 'On the Good of Marriage' that offspring are one of three benefits of marriage (along with faithfulness and the sacrament of matrimony itself). In the summa, Aquinas attempts to argue which of these is the 'chief' good of marriage. Thomas believes the sacrament of matrimony itself is the chief good. Now, most here don't necessarily have the religious view of marriage (nor do they need to), but aside from the sacrament, it's faithfulness and offspring that remain. Nowhere there is status and power. And these men are again writing on the predominant moral system of the Western world for the past thousand years.
Going to secular philosophers, Aristotle (from whom Aquinas derived a lot) also consistently writes that marriage is for children. His other aims of marriage are community stability and pleasure. Again, nowhere does status and power appear.
Historically, those with obvious sterility (castrated men, impotent men, women without vaginas) could not get married. In the Catholic church, which still adheres to roman marriage laws, these are absolute impediments to marriage. In fact, permanent impotence is an impediment to marriage in many US states today. A marriage can be undone if the man was found to be impotent before the marriage was contracted, and the impotence is permanent medically.
Scientifically, one cannot know if you're sterile until you've tried. There's no 'test' for sterility that truly works or that there hasn't been an exception too. Legally, once a marriage is fully consummated, it's more permanent than if it weren't. Historically, a marriage that was consummated could not be dissolved and was considered permanent at that point, so even if you later found out (usually after many years) that you couldn't have kids, the marriage would continue. Similar to how old people stay married.
I'm giving an historical view on marriage. Not saying how things should be. You seem incredulous at this view, but it was the prevailing view of marriage in Europe and the West for thousands of years.
Thanks for your response in the other thread (FTR your reply was already flagged dead by the time I noticed it). I’m responding to that.
I understand your position. On your point about why people think marriage is a right… I suspect this is because, at present, many rights are coupled with marriage - visitation rights at a hospital being the classic example.
For these particular rights, I think we should have a flexible kinship designation system. I don't see why you would have to have exclusivity for this right. In the madness over 'equality', I think we avoided a much better system for these rights.
I occasionally wonder just how high the prevalence of closeted homosexuals is amongst conservatives, given how strongly they seem to believe that sexual preference is a choice. The only logical conclusion is that at some point they chose.
Have you read (or "read"; I don't want to be responsible for your death lol) the Texas GOP platform[1] for this year? The first sentence in the "Homosexuality and Gender Issues" section is "Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice". And they follow it up with "we oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality".
They are rearing for another battle in the gay rights culture war.
The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing equal protection was supposed to end the patchwork system of having to live in the right state to be recognized as a full citizen.
> So the issue is really what the hell is wrong with the states where the people elected feel empowered to take rights away from half their populace.
As I just said in my chosen Mastodon instance:
“Ever since today’s Supreme Court decision was leaked, some have said that this oddly might hurt the Republicans in future elections — i.e., they’ll no longer have Roe v. Wade to use against the Democrats. However, this ignores what made today possible: the power of the Christian Right, particularly those whose votes won’t be erased by some currently running for office on promising to make it harder for anti-Rightists to vote (or have their votes count).”
Those of you who don’t have a lot of exposure to that culture, and the way it has completely taken over a good chunk of American politics — not to mention one of the two major U.S. political parties — in the last forty-plus years, will find today a shock. And wait ’til you see what else they have in mind.
Won't pro-lifers still vote for Republicans in order, to, you know, legislate pro-life laws? All this decision does is place the issue back in the hands of the legislative branch, where it should always have been. Now, it's up to you to vote for what you want.
Of the following two forces, the Christian right and the atheist Marxist left, I promise you the latter is far more shocking, dangerous, and self-destructive to America.
And if you say something like, "these people don't represent
us," You can probably guess I'll respond: the small number of men who rioted at the capitol without any actual realistic plan to perform a coup don't represent us either.
Leftist activists, unfortunately, are much smarter about what it takes to really overthrow a government, and they've been in it for the long haul for almost a century now.
Oh I’m sorry did the protestors at Amy Barret’s house break in and smear feces on the walls? No, they just peacefully assembled? Yeah that isn’t an insurrection by any means.
People loudly protest all the time, that isn’t the same thing as “domestic terrorism” even if some property gets damaged or relatively few people get hurt. By that definition the civil rights movement would have been domestic terrorism. You know what is domestic terrorism? Firebombing abortion clinics and murdering doctors like some “Christian” right members have done.
Frankly the people who stormed the Capital are a sideshow. The real coup was directed from the highest seats of government to prevent the peaceful transition of power, and the mob was merely a minor part of the plan.
The real action was in getting Pence out and selecting alternate electors illegally sent.
"it is unlawful to protest near a “residence occupied or used by [a] judge, juror, witness, or court officer” with the intent of influencing “the discharge of his duty,”"
What they were doing clearly amounts to intimidating the justices, including by putting them in harm's way by announcing their home addresses on the Internet.
"Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States."
What they are doing is illegally engaging in rebellion against authority. It is insurrection.
I also can't believe you are calling this "protesting loudly":
"The DHS agent reportedly told the diocese that “large groups with cells nationwide have already been discovered ‘casing’ parishes, including here in California.”"
What they are planning to do, is, in fact domestic terrorism. Your condemnation of the right while supporting the terrorism of the left is very revealing. At least people on the right are willing to condemn both. We at least have principles.
Principles such as refusing to condemn the former President’s coup apparently. Or even watch evidence about it.
I have condemned terrorism on the left, for example eco-terrorism (which seems to have thankfully died off). I didn’t read the DOJ notice, but it is important to note their job is to take the worst case scenario and plan for it. I haven’t seen widespread attacks on parishes and don’t honestly believe they will occur. Some insane portion of people on both sides issue a lot of dumb threats but only rarely are those threats executed on. If they do I will of course condemn them. But I will always place more emphasis on events which have actually happened, not just hypotheticals. For example the recent troubling incident in Idaho where a few dozen men with guns were headed to attack a parade. Multiple studies have shown that 90+% of domestic terrorism is linked to the right wing.
I do not support harassing judges, but I hardly think that rises to any level of insurrection. They weren’t attacking the authority of the government or even of the justice in question. I doubt most of them even intended or expected her to change her mind. Even if you are right and they were attempting to unduly influence her, that wouldn’t be undermining her authority but relying upon it.
It reflects the current reality - justices have become partisan so people believe they are entitled to treat them as any other partisan politicians, who as elected officials are required to be accountable to the people. We should prevent that. Justices not acting as naked partisans would help, as would both parties compromising and writing laws again so fewer things of import are decided by unelected justices. Controversial decisions should allow both parties share some of the blame, because any good society requires controversial decisions to be effective.
By the way, if protesting outside a justices home is insurrection, then the right is guilty again - they protested outside numerous state election officials homes to attempt to pressure them to violate their oaths to keep Trump in power. They also issued numerous death threats, which thankfully didn’t happen. And published home addresses.
We need to step down from this level of rancor and return to democracy in action. The broad public is in agreement on most things and supports reasonable compromises, but our governmental structure has stopped making them viable.
I read through the DOJ notice and it warns of multiple targets including abortion clinics. After the leaked draft, they say arson attacks occurred to pregnancy resource centers. Another area of concern is violence being directed against “First Amendment protected events” e.g. protests.
Then finally some vandalism at “religious facilities perceived as being opposed to abortion.”
So unfortunately they seem to say violence is more likely from all sides as the result of this.
Even with that, arson attacks are more serious then vandalism. So to date both sides aren’t equally indulging in violence.
Have you even been watching the January 6th hearings? Some randos posting fliers on telephone poles is hardly equivalent to POTUS leveraging the DOJ, DOD, state legislatures, the Republican Congress, Republican Senate, and extremist militias to mount a violent coup.
Am I watching one of the biggest shams of a partisan witch hunt in history? Of course not. Call me when they file charges against the former president or any other current or former government officials for insurrection.
Okay well maybe you should keep your opinions about insurrection to yourself if they are uninformed. As far as your claim about the committee being partisan though, the hearing yesterday was almost entirely conducted by Republicans, with exclusively Republican witnesses who were appointed by and served under Trump. How can you claim the investigation is a sham if you haven’t seen any evidence? How can you say it is partisan when the committee composition is bipartisan and witnesses have mostly been staunch Republicans drawn from the Trump admin?
Republicans have always been against abortion, yet people vote for them, isnt that how democracy works? Major chunk of the US population dont support abortion and keep voting for politicians who support those beliefs.
I wonder how many voted republican in spite of abortion because of Roe vs. Wade. Given what happened today this could hurt republican support because it makes abortion a more direct election issue. I wouldn't necessarily just assume all republicans are pro-life.
That is extrapolating too far. Many (perhaps most?) voters are single issue voters. Saying that all Republicans support banning abortion is not accurate; some people are Republicans for the tax breaks, etc.
That worked well before it became just another body of partisan zealots. Now we have the tyranny of whichever partisan zealots have a run a good dumb luck.
I’ve taken to defining nihilism as being so dedicated to an ephemera and philosophy, harm to real people is ignored.
This decision gives states to impact interstate business. It controls what doctors and patients can discuss. So it goes a good long way to squashing other rights in deference to pudding brains traditions. They chose not with logic but delusion.
Figurative identity preferences are being leveraged to directly control human agency.
I don’t owe coddling anyone else’s sensibilities. There is no greater good. And I hope this society collapses around us and reminds the majority how meaningless their personal self image is to others.
“Tyranny of the minority” is even worse and that’s what we are seeing now. This Court isn’t upholding minority rights against the State, it’s doing the reverse, taking away rights from minorities (poor women without easy access to travel to another state if necessary).
We have six jurists with an extremist legal view called “originalism” which is “let’s imagine I’m a white male in 1800, what would I think about X”. The first Supreme Court decision to mention originalism was in 1994, when Scalia dissented because he thought juveniles should be executed.
There are people who would dispute whether there's a helpless minority whose rights are being protected by this Court's decision. You can disagree on the resolution, but don't handwave away the almost unique conflict of rights abortion presents between the bodily autonomy of the mother and the right to life of the child. You'll convince nobody by proceeding so dishonestly.
I'm not about to dignify such an obvious bad-faith argument as is represented by your parody of originalism.
You see a woman as an incubator of a "child" that has a right to life. This is biologically wrong and the fact that so many people share this view is an indictment of America's failed education system.
Even serious pro-choice scholars concede that a fetus is biologically a human life e.g., Peter Singer. If your argument is that a child is definitional not unborn then that is a semantic argument of no moral relevance.
So what you are saying is that there is a huge gray area between a clump of cells and a child being born? Maybe even that pregnancy starts out nearly 100% a bodily autonomy issue and culminates in the life of a child?
Sounds like a good argument against allowing late term abortions, and a good argument against banning them outright.
That's a possible view, though not my own. I personally think it is going to remain contentious until, technologically, we can remove the conflict of rights by allowing the child to come to term outside the mother's body. It would be hard to support a right to kill the child when it could mature with no additional inconvenience to the mother.
My wife had a successful, “uncomplicated” pregnancy and has permanent lifelong physical and mental damage from it. Not that this is anyone’s business, but apparently I have to share this private information because of all the extreme ignorance out there.
It’s hard to believe there is such ignorance out there that pregnancy isn’t even considered an inconvenience by some men, let alone a life threatening event. If I can object to my corpse being used for organ donation to save lives, a woman should be able to object to her organs being used to support the extreme demands of a growing fetus. But now we are in the odd situation of corpses having more bodily autonomy rights than women.
I think I have not made my explanation clear to you, because what you have written, and should not have felt compelled to write, supports what I'm saying. I'm saying that abortion will cease to be an issue when we can, technologically, end the pregnancy without terminating the unborn life, avoiding exactly the situation you describe. I'm very sorry that your wife had to experience what she did.
Whether right or wrong, they have definitely provided a counterbalance against democracy. The Court has stood for what it believes are the rights of people who are unable to participate in democracy because they have not yet been born. They are, in the eyes of democracy, a minority of zero, though they number almost a million per year. Whether or not you or I agree with them, they have acted as a check on democracy.
A “monitory of zero” clearly has no need to be protected by a legal system.
Just like we don’t legislate that you can’t kill plants for the sake of the plant, a fetus spends up to 18 weeks in a non-sentient state where it has no subjective experience. It doesn’t need protection since a non-sentient being can’t suffer.
Edit: it’s also worth mentioning that many abortions happen at the zygote or embryo stage, before there is even a fetus.
As I understand it, at any point where the Democrats held the majority of the legislature (including now) they could have passed federal abortion legislation and this would be moot.
The Senate is split 50/50 with two Dems blocking significant portions of the platform. Saying they have control is misrepresenting the current situation.
The federal government cannot pass a law that restricts the state and local governments from passing anti-abortion legislation. The only remedy is a constitutional amendment, and there have never been the votes for that.
Blacks gaining rights was done primarily via constitutional amendment and later civil rights acts, all passed by the legislative branch. Some believe the courts did in fact go too far during 60s.
Women I believe were always allowed to work, so I'm not sure what this example has to do with anything?
Women being allowed to vote was done via constitutional amendment, again, by the legislative branch.
If you think marriage should be redefined and repurposed so it is not primarily about rearing one's own children, then, by all means, get it redefined, but, do it via legislation, not judicial activism.
Like, are you serious? Judicial fiat literally overruled the will of the people and forced concealed carry to be legal.
New York decided over 100 years ago that people shouldn't be allowed to conceal carry without a good reason and now a bunch of activist judges have forced concealed carry on everyone.
> Acceptance of gay marriage is being forced on everyone
Let's follow this line of reasoning to it's logical conclusion.
What if someone decides that acceptance of your religion, race and ethnicity is also being forcen on everyone? What if they get some funny ideas about Lebensraum?
They literally just overturned gun regulations that some states lawfully enacted. You’re cherry picking your views as much as the court is cherry picking their reading of the constitution.
They overturned "may issue" laws where you could meet all the training and qualifications to legally carry but a state official could make an arbitrary judgement call based on if you had a "good reason" to carry.
All states with "shall issue" are still in effect because its a straight here are the requirements, if you meet them and are not a prohibited person, you get your permit.
Also, the right to bear arms is explicitly enumerated in the constitution, so taking that right away isn't up to the states. The right to an abortion is not. So it goes to each state to decide.
It’s not explicitly enumerated more than anything else we’re talking about. It’s always up to interpretation. Does the constitution say where to draw line between me bearing a knife and a nuke? Nope, ‘arms’ is defined conveniently in the eyes of whoever’s in power when this is decided. That’s how all of this works!
> When liberal justices are in charge, they unconstitutionally force their will onto the people.
One person having a right to do something is not forcing it on anyone else.
> place the power back in the hands of the people.
A majority of "the people" do not agree with this decision. In fact, they were appointed by someone who did not have majority support, by a party that represents a minority of the actual population.
> The problem was activist judges making the Roe decision in the first place.
You just got a handful of judges making decisions based on their regligious beliefs. Please explain to me how you see that as different than an original decision?
The judges forced their morality on everyone by saying the constitution gave a right to an abortion. The constitution does no such thing, meaning the judges were acting as activists, legislating from the bench, rather than doing their jobs correctly. If you are honest, you should be able to say both that you are pro-abortion and that Roe v. wade was possibly the worst supreme court decision of the 20th century.
The secular argument against abortion is so incredibly simple: the unborn child has the right to life just as the mother does. Government is about managing the rights of everyone and balancing them when they come in conflict.
And, finally, abortion is forced on our society in the sense that our tax dollars fund it, our tax dollars fund public schools that promote it, and, if the left have their way, insurance companies will be forced to cover it, possibly free of charge: https://noqreport.com/2021/02/09/california-bill-would-force...
You are aware that Roe v. Wade was originally decided by a conservative court, right?
> The secular argument against abortion is so incredibly simple: the unborn child has the right to life just as the mother does. Government is about managing the rights of everyone and balancing them when they come in conflict.
That’s exactly what Roe managed to do for 50 years. Now there will be about half the country where these competing rights are not balanced, but tilt entirely in the favor of the fetus to the detriment of the woman.
> When liberal justices are in charge, they unconstitutionally force their will onto the people. When conservative justices are in charge, they just undo the damage of the liberal justices and place the power back in the hands of the people.
You have the alternative of dropping from the world and stop using all things paid with your taxes.
> The left have grown militant, and increasingly want to force their world view on everyone else.
I'm curious to know exactly _what_ harms you about gay marriage or abortions, other than your feelings.
On one side, we have people gaining rights, whereas on the other, there are people who don't agree with it. And I'm having a hard time understanding why your feelings are supposed to have more weight in a society, than their rights.
You frame this in a way so it is about tax money, but frankly, there is no possible tax system where people only pay for what they want.
And I thought hallucinogens was a left-wing shtick!
> The left have grown militant
So let me get this straight, the year is 2022, when the Soviet union is gone, the Chinese Communist Party is practicing free market, the percentage of unionised workforce is the lowest it's been since 1917 and the effective corporate tax rate is the lowest it's been in 70 years - this, here, is the time of left-wing world order and militarism?
Virtually nothing any branch of the federal government does is "the will of the people"[1]. But even if our government were a functioning representative republic with strong democratic traditions as it purports to be, the purpose of the courts will still be to act as a check on the will of the people, not just a cheerleader for mob rule.
No, the will of the people should be expressed as amendments to the constitution.
It is a serious flaw is the US system that issues that carry supper majority support in the public for decades have no chance of making it into the constitution.
The last amendment was passed 30 years ago, and the one before was 50 years ago. Maybe most of the politicians in charge only pay lip service to an issue, and don't have the will to die on a hill for anything, or leave anything for those who come after them.
I think it's a combination of it being too hard, and politicians "saving" issues, keeping them live, to motivate voters. Many times in the past 30 years the dems could have passed a federal law protecting abortion rights.
Roe v. Wade wasn't the will of the people. If the will of the people is to make abortion legal, they would vote for politicians that make abortion legal. In Mississippi, they clearly voted for the opposite.
It can't happen because 30% of republican primary voters are evangelicals, so every republican will vote against abortion protection, even if most of their constituents want it.
It's certainly a tricky question. How granular should we get? People's actions in other states still affect everyone in the country. I don't want unwanted children to exist in this country, they require government handouts and become a drag at a much higher rate. Plus kids are smart, they realize they're unwanted and that sucks. Since those people use tax dollars that I pay should I not have a say?
You’re specifying your opinion (which is reasonable), but that’s orthogonal to the rights of the people that live in that state and vote according to the rights they wish to exercise.
If state A wants to ban abortion based on what their constituency wants, isn’t that exactly how democracy works?
If country A wants to ban banning abortion based on what their constituency wants, isn't that exactly how democracy works? Why should local vs federal constituency matter more?
Because the country was explicitly founded in a way that local matters more. If you want abortions, go to an abortion state. Is it so intolerable that Mississippians as a whole want different things than you and your state residents do?
Then wanting to do things differently is fine of course. The problem I have is that Mississippi receives $7,000 more from the federal government than they pay per capita every year. Bringing unwanted children into the state will make that worse. Why should they get to collect my tax dollars and then make decisions that cause the rest of the country harm?
If we only want profitable people represented, we can skip the extra steps and just have a voting fee, or even just a landowning requirement! Then the poors won't be able to screw up the country at all
Thomas - "...in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. ... we have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents"
Just like how the people who are upset about this ruling can be upset that when their party controlled all 3 branches numerous times, they never put abortion into the constitution to firmly protect it, or the other "rights" you mentioned. Instead they use it as an emotional club every election to get votes, but did nothing to protect it when they had the power to do so.
> they never put abortion into the constitution to firmly protect it
Neither party has had the votes to do that in a while (2/3rds in both the House and the Senate). It must also be ratified by 3/4ths of the states (38 right now).
Your comment trivializes how difficult it is to pass a constitutional amendment.
An amendment on an issue this polarizing would never get the requisite support from enough states, no to mention that it doesn’t even matter if you control three branches of government to pass an amendment, only Congress is involved in the process.
The political point is valid, though. There have been multiple windows for Democrats to pass federal laws that would have helped solidify these rights. Nothing was done, because cultural arguments help both sides in the electoral theatre.
Except it isn’t valid, because while there was a Supreme Court precedent, such a law would be superfluous, and while there now isn’t, such a law would’ve be repealed the moment republicans regain control of the congress.
Do you really think that a Republican controlled Congress for the majority of the 2010s would have allowed such a law to remain on the books?
Do you really think no superfluous law is ever passed...? The books are full of them.
> such a law would’ve be repealed the moment republicans regain control of the congress
Maybe, or maybe it would have increased Democratic majorities and forced Republicans to face a politically dangerous repeal or even a major policy switch.
Politicians are ready to go with the flow... see for example gay marriage in the UK, which was cautiously introduced by Labour as a separate formulation and then brought into full existence, with great fanfare, by a Conservative Party that had been staunchly against it for decades prior.
> Do you really think no superfluous law is ever passed...?
A comment ago you were complaining about political theater, how is passing superfluous laws anything but political theater?
> Maybe, or maybe it would have increased Democratic majorities and forced Republicans to face a politically dangerous repeal or even a major policy switch.
This suggests to me that you aren’t very familiar with the last 50 years of American political history.
So doesn’t this simply create two Americas, those with regressive laws and those with progressive laws, and people can choose between them and the market will show which laws attract people that create economic value?
I see half of the US becoming economically fallow as a result of this decline into dystopia.
Well, poor people are less likely to be able to travel to get abortions where it's legal. So higher infant mortality, higher maternal mortality, and more kids in the foster system, putting a strain on a likely already small (because red state) budget.
But otherwise, I agree, this will just further the red states' economic bankruptcy.
Note though that the majority opinion itself specifically calls out these cases several times as different from abortion because they do not result in the termination of a potential life. Here is one specific quote:
Unable to show concrete reliance on Roe and Casey them-
selves, the Solicitor General suggests that overruling those
decisions would “threaten the Court’s precedents holding
that the Due Process Clause protects other rights.” Brief
for United States 26 (citing Obergefell, 576 U. S. 644; Law-
rence, 539 U. S. 558; Griswold, 381 U. S. 479). That is not
correct for reasons we have already discussed. As even the
Casey plurality recognized, “[a]bortion is a unique act” be-
cause it terminates “life or potential life.” 505 U. S., at 852;
see also Roe, 410 U. S., at 159 (abortion is “inherently dif-
ferent from marital intimacy,” “marriage,” or “procrea-
tion”). And to ensure that our decision is not misunderstood
or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision con-
cerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right.
Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt
on precedents that do not concern abortion
As an Australian, a few things about the SCOTUS absolutely shock me, aside from the obvious issue of politicisation.
I've only skimmed the judgment, but Roberts CJ convincingly points out that there was no need for the court to completely overturn Roe. It would suffice to jettison the viability standard. Going further was completely unnecessary to decide the case.
On the other hand, Thomas J took the occasion, without having heard complete argument on the respective issues, to opine that other substantive due process rights should be reconsidered. Including Griswold (no banning controceptives), Lawrence (no banning sodomy), and Obergefell (no banning gay marriage). This is simply astounding.
The second is the sheer hypocrisy of the members of the court who decry judicial activism while, in the next breath, engaging in the same.
I've never heard such a limiting definition for judicial activism. It's typically understood more broadly as a criticism of American judges who, according to some, go beyond their duties of "interpreting law" and instead create it. To borrow from conservapedia (a resource I wouldn't otherwise defend, except in this limited case), it's "when judges substitute their own political opinions for the applicable law, or when judges act like a legislature (legislating from the bench) rather than like a traditional court."
Judicial activism is altering laws according to what the judge likes, usurping a legislative role. The supreme court striking down state laws is the typical form of such abuse because the typical supreme court case is deciding whether a certain new law has a problem.
Roe vs. Wade is practically almost the same as a law that allows abortion, the other threatened precedents cited in the other comments are similarly almost laws that allow various rights, and so there is very little "upholding" of existing laws in this demolition and threatened demolition of "liberal" norms.
In my opinion, It's up to the federal government to make federal laws, not the supreme court. Democrats had _plenty_ of time to put the right for abortion into a law and pass it. Now, they have a platform on which to run for the next election, convenient...
Politicians delegate too many decisions to the SCOTUS because they don't want to govern, well the SCOTUS isn't supposed to govern in their place.
If nothing can get done at Washington, then the problem is at Washington itself, not the supreme court.
I would buy this as an argument if the Court, when presented with ways to absolutely improve the legislative situation, add more checks and balances to the legislature, and make it more democratic, doesn’t turn around and do the opposite (gerrymandering and Citizens United are two obvious examples).
i think it's a twrrible decision, but you have a point policians can keep kicking issues into the long grass- ultinately it will land on scotus and they have to make a decision
The problem as always is the silent filibuster. If obstructionists in the senate actually had to stand up and defend their obstruction more things would get done.
Laws like that would only be possible in certain years where there’s a majority across all 3 branches (e.g. 2008) and neutered when the other branch is in power.
Arguably a supreme court decision is more stable.
A constitutional amendment would be most stable but we will never get to that level of state support
The democrats would not have been able to make the right for abortion into a law during that period. And women should not have to suffer because the republic is dysfunctional.
Roe stood for years because the decision directly tied it to the right to privacy (via the 9th and 14th amendments), because that right "is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether to terminate her pregnancy". The Supreme Court reverses itself in this Dobbs decision; skimming the final decision, it attempts to tear down the original justification, but I'm not seeing an argument beyond "we think they were wrong", which is a pretty awful rationale for the Supreme Court.
The decision threw out Roe entirely (Roberts' concurrence notwithstanding) -- and Roe was based on two legal theories: a right to privacy (implied, but not made explicit, in the Bill of Rights, and interpreted by Roe to be under the 9th and 14th amendments), and that a law that could only be enforced via unconstitutional searches was itself unconstitutional. Alito's decision doesn't tackle _how_ Roe was wrong, it simply declares that the court erred when it considered those privacy rights.
I'm pro-choice but I still believe that this is the right move.
> “My criticism of Roe is that it seemed to have stopped the momentum on the side of change,” Ginsburg said. She would’ve preferred that abortion rights be secured more gradually, in a process that included state legislatures and the courts, she added. Ginsburg also was troubled that the focus on Roe was on a right to privacy, rather than women’s rights.
Could you explain this a bit more please? (I'm not from the US so I'm possibly missing something but your comment is surprising at a broad strokes level)
Edit: I see you've edited your post already with a quote which is helpful.
I basically see people holding states more accountable now. State politicians who are pro-life are on notice. They can no longer cry about it and blame the federal government. The issue is now on their plate- and it's a thorny one. People need to vote.
But the Supreme Court just banned the rights of states to decide how they apply gun laws. Specifically, New York was prevented [days ago](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-gun-law-new-york-...) from deciding how concealed carry should be implemented.
Surely you can see the hypocrisy in only being in favour of state rights when it suits you.
I think that it's more complicated than that. My take away was that NY gun laws allowed people to concealed carry with approval but were basically denying lawful approvals which ran afoul of the second amendment.
It ran around of the 14th amendment. Only people who donated money to the right politicians got approved for CCL. NY is still free to regulate handgun carry requirements, they just can't deny permits arbitrarily.
As much as it pains me to point this out, you cannot draw much of an analog between abortion and gun laws when it comes to states rights, because guns are protected by the Constitution very explicitly, abortion is not.
You should read the actual opinion, and not the "summary" that this journalist put together. They didn't "ban the rights of states to decide how they apply gun laws". Simply that certain types of "may issue" permitting are at odds with 2A, because they deny Americans the exercise of an enumerated right for arbitrary reasons.
Permit Requester: I want to carry a pistol outside the home for self defense reasons.
Issuer: I don't believe your self defense claims are legitimate.
Requester: Why?
Issuer: I don't have to tell you.
SCOTUS enters the chat: This is no longer allowed.
There's a big difference in how you framed it, how that journalist framed it, and what actually happened. There is no hypocrisy here.
That sounds good in theory, but we know about the states where the republicans seemingly cannot be voted out of office - not helped by all their changes to the election system to prevent that. But indeed it would be ironic, if the public reaction to this were that strong so that a lot of red states turn blue. But I don't have too high hopes. Too many people in the whole spectrum don't see a ban of abortion affecting them while it is too easy to be "pro life".
Here is a thought: I'm a pro-choice New Englander. If those states like Kentucky are so strongly pro-life, then who am I to push my New England center/lib culture onto them?
It's liberating in a way- I don't need the whole country to subscribe to living like me or holding the same beliefs and that's okay.
To what extent are you willing to let other states restrict rights of US citizens because their cultural majority is different from yours? Is there a line? Perhaps 330 million people is too many to have in a single culture.
I am starting to come around to that view myself. The mythology of America has been dying for some time, and accelerating dramatically in the last few decades. Without that mythology to bind us together, it may be that we are more different than we thought. Arguably the majority of people in the southeast, for example, do not share the same values as people in the northwest. Maybe they should not try.
Our mythology has always been life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Freedom of speech and religion. Democracy. Rule of law. They aren't as radical and in vogue today but this was and still is our "mythology", IMO.
I think that's an idealized interpretation of a young country that spent it's first 100 years believing humanity is attached to skin color, fought a brutal civil war over that before spending its next 100 years preventing most of them from entering commerce, and its last ~50 years incarcerating as many of them as possible. And things like shadow wars in Cambodia do not look good on a country proclaiming "rule of law". So perhaps that's how you perceive it's shared methodology, but certainly not "how it has always been".
My theory is not that mythology kept you together, but that there was enough cultural and physical space to peacefully ignore each other if anyone so wished, simply by moving a bit further away. Communications were slow enough that they could be digested or ignored more or less at will.
The problem is that, between natural population growth and the rise of the internet, both the cultural plane and the physical one have largely run out of space. Figurative "midwest zealots" just cannot live their lives ignoring "coastern heathens" even if they'd like to, and viceversa. And so the fights have broken out and will likely continue for a long time.
This is not a state issue or a cultural issue, it is an individual issue.
It does not matter what people in Kentucky think. They do not have the right to an opinion on another person's life decisions. Even if every person in Kentucky, or every person on the planet believed abortion is wrong, that would not impact an individual person's right to an abortion. Abortion is outside the scope of what governments can legitimately legislate, because individuals have sovereign control over their bodies.
> They do not have the right to an opinion on another person's life decisions.
The other side says that the fetus is a person with rights that are being trampled. And around and around we go forever. I am personally pro choice but I do understand that this is 100% my own subjective opinion.
Are you at all concerned that now that this becomes a State level issue we move the wedge from a single federal level to 50 different wedges clogging up legislatures? We've been arguing about Roe for half a century, will this lead to resolution or is it a metastasization? Just an initial thought I had, even though I agree on all your points.
I'm not sure the political currents present in America today indicate that states won't eagerly trample the right's of their citizens. Especially considering the voting restrictions and minoritarian rule pet projects of the right.
America is also rife with examples of the federal government intervening to protect citizens from their states — Brown v Board, or most extremely the Civil War.
"People need to vote" is insufficient for regressions on issues that affect people's livelihoods. For example, Texas has a larger democrat-voting population than many blue states, "just voting" won't do anything to improve their livelyhood in the foreseeable future.
Ahmen to that. We wouldn't be in this situation if liberals took voting as seriously as conservatives.
I've seen 100's of comments over the last year about how "I'm done voting because the student loans were not forgiven" ... I don't think the next period in America is going to go very well.
The original Roe v Wade ruling, regardless of opinion on the outcome, was widely viewed as being based on a weak and poorly reasoned judicial argument. The risk of leaving defective judicial reasoning as precedent is that it enables a whole class of undesirable legal outcomes in the future unrelated to abortion. For this reason, it was expected that the Supreme Court would eventually fix this mistake. This ruling doesn't outlaw abortion, it merely moves it outside that court's jurisdiction and leaves it to other parts of government to decide.
I support this ruling for this reason even though I am against outlawing abortion.
It wasn't. This ruling is not about the constitution it's about power. Roe vs Wade was fine. This ruling is based on the fact that Republicans after decades got 6 extreme social conservatives on the court who decided they don't like Abortion
do you think the supreme court did this because they share the same opinion as rbg? I think this Case was maybe a wonky solution for the Problem but it was the only one you Americans Had.
RBG thought that Roe v Wade won for the wrong reasons, but didn't want to repeal it because of the damage she knew it would cause – she wanted to roll-forward rather than roll-back.
This court, or at least the conservative majority, are very much in favour of rolling-back, and I suspect are only vaguely in favour of letting the legislature pass laws because they know that there will be challenges to those laws that they can then get involved in, meanwhile they have shifted the overton window of women's rights.
It's important to note that the idea that Roe was decided incorrectly, is a myth perpetuated by fedsoc and other reactionaries. And the liberal legal academics did nothing to counter it.
Only if you buy in to the reactionary attack on substantive due process in general. And it's a mistake to think if Roe were decided any other way, that it still wouldn't have been overturned. Reactionaries do a great job of smuggling their politics as socially acceptable, fictional legal frameworks like textualism, even though they clearly abandon that whenever it is in conflict with their politics.
Do you really think they wouldn't still overturn if it was decided based on equal protection? We should not fall into the trap of deifying the court. They are not above politics and they never have been.
And they didn't rule against it because of the privacy angle. They ruled against it because they are trying to destroy the jurisprudence of substantive due process and unenumerated rights, because it serves their reactionary politics.
So you believe that doing the wrong thing for the right reason is better than doing the right thing for the wrong reason? That intent matters more than outcome? And that laws being structured in a way you specifically find compelling matters more than the morality of a law?
I think we can have some nuance here. As individuals I believe we have the leeway to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. But once we get to the level of government and acting in accordance with laws, I believe that acting for the right reasons (i.e. following the laws) is the only option that can lead to long term outcomes.
For the government to selectively follow laws, saying that in this case they don't apply since they don't give us the right result, makes a mockery of the very idea of having laws.
The Roe vs. Wade decision was the wrong way to solve the problem because it specifically set the stage for decades where the legislature didn't enshrine abortion as a right, and thus left it up for grabs to be taken back away only decades later. Ruth Bader Ginsburg argues that if Roe vs. Wade had been less sweeping, that the existing cultural movement in favor of women's rights would have naturally led to the protection of this right on a more fundamental and long lasting level.
If we're speaking about what one should use as guiding principles, then it seems that if one acts for the "right" reasons, then that usually result in doing the right thing and only unusually results in doing the wrong thing.
Whereas if one acts for the "wrong" reasons, then that will only rarely result in doing the "right" thing.
One can look back at the original Roe v Wade and say "The right thing was done here, the outcome was good", but having that sort of consequentialist outlook tends to blind people to the downside of having the right things done for the wrong reasons- which is as we see here, those wrong reasons can in the future easily lead to the undoing of the right thing.
The original Roe v Wade decision meant that Congress never had to pass a law that explicitly nationally legalized abortion. If they had, the current situation wouldn't exist.
The problem is that even if abortion rights are re-established on stronger footing in the future, a whole lot of people are going to get hurt in the meantime.
You believe it is right on a technicality, but don't care to factor in the women who are guaranteed an early, unnecessary death because of this ruling?
People are guaranteed early, unnecessary deaths when they cannot afford expensive medical treatments for their rare conditions. Or insulin for their diabetes. Or housing for their family.
Where in our constitution and laws are these things codified as rights? They are not.
In the same way, abortion is not a right. But I believe it should be. This is an issue that our elected officials must decide, not the courts.
None of your analogies are applicable. Somebody dying because their personal circumstances made receiving medical care difficult or impossible, is patently different than dying because someone else was allowed to deny them medical care by imposing their personal religious beliefs.
How is pregnancy not a personal circumstance? Anyway, you are right that they are not directly comparable because pregnancy and abortion are such unique things. I suppose the most similar analogy I could think of is a doctor refusing to perform a surgery which has a high chance of outright killing a patient and a smaller chance of treating the issue.
Either way, there is no constitutional right to an abortion, and that is the fundamental issue. Call your representatives and demand them to take action on codifying the right to abortion.
Pregnancy does not, in and of itself, prevent access to medical care. So while it is a personal circumstance, it is entirely inapplicable within the context of care being intentionally prevented.
> I suppose the most similar analogy I could think of is a doctor refusing to perform a surgery which has a high chance of outright killing a patient and a smaller chance of treating the issue.
Not analogous, at all. That's a medical professional making a single medical decision based on medical information. That surgeon is not preventing the patient from finding another surgeon who will perform the procedure. Whereas what you're suggesting, is that freedom of religion should give politicians the right to make a singular blanket medical decision on behalf of everyone in their state, present and future, without any situational knowledge or medical reasoning.
It's not a constitutional right to abortion. It's a constitutional right to not have personal liberties stripped by the states which are enumerated in the Constitution. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion and right to privacy are all enumerably applicable to preserving this liberty. The ability for anyone to impose their personal religious beliefs on a population violates all of those rights.
I don’t know why you keep bringing up religion, I have not mentioned it at all. Perhaps you are conflating the reason for some states passing of anti-abortion laws with the law itself.
Either way, the federal government does not grant this right, therefore it is up to states to decide.
> It's a constitutional right (9th amendment) to not have personal liberties stripped by the states which are not enumerated in the Constitution. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion and right to privacy are all enumerably applicable to preserving this liberty.
None of these rights apply to abortion. If anything, there should be an enumerated right to bodily autonomy.
> I don’t know why you keep bringing up religion, I have not mentioned it at all.
The only objection anyone has to abortion is based on religious beliefs. So, you didn't need to mention it. It's the foundation of the entire issue -- that religious beliefs can be imposed on a population as law. Saying that it's irrelevant to the discussion betrays an ignorance of the subject at hand.
> None of these rights apply to abortion. If anything, there should be an enumerated right to bodily autonomy.
The enumeration does not need to specifically reference the word to be applicable. For a different example, the 4th amendment doesn't contain any verbiage about police officers opening a trunk during a traffic stop, but the declaration that they must have probable cause still applies. In the exact same way, to assert religious beliefs that affect someone else's medical care violates all of the rights I listed.
> The only objection anyone has to abortion is based on religious beliefs
Uh…what? I am not religious (agnostic/atheist) but I object to abortion after a certain amount of time except in the cases of grave bodily harm or being the product of forced reproduction (idk what the site rules are on certain language, but I trust you understand what I mean). I believe that the unborn baby is a viable human life at some point and that abortion without a justifiable reason after that point would be equivalent to murder. I also believe many people also feel the same way I do.
> The enumeration does not need to specifically reference the word to be applicable
Yes, but we are in disagreement on which rights are applicable in this case.
> I believe that the unborn baby is a viable human life at some point and that abortion without a justifiable reason after that point would be equivalent to murder.
That's the entire point! You're not objecting to abortion. You're objecting at some point in time and only when it's medically unjustifiable. But those moral thresholds are different for every individual and there are medically justifiable situations, which is exactly why no individual should be able to impose their personal beliefs as a law which declares those medical situations as unjustifiable.
You're welcome to have moral objections and believe they are the most correct or reasonable, but they have no bearing on the concerted efforts of religious groups and individuals to outright ban access to medical care. And that's the discussion at hand, which you keep conveniently ignoring. Many people have total opposition to all abortions in all situations and specifically for religious reasons, which is what actual, real-life politicians are implementing as we speak.
Someone else having an abortion (whether you believe it's murder or not) doesn't infringe on your rights. But you imposing your beliefs in a way that affects someone else's medical care is absolutely infringing on their rights. These are fundamental concepts of our democracy.
Just because everyone may not be be able to agree on exactly when that viability threshold is or what reasons are justifiable does not mean we should not attempt to do so. Almost all states (and other countries) where abortion is legalized still have reasonable limits on when they may be performed (e.g., not after second trimester). I think we would both agree that an abortion of an otherwise viable and healthy baby one day before expected delivery would be unethical.
The religious arguments for banning all abortion for any reasons are not sound and I would not expect such laws to pass scrutiny when challenged in court (but who knows nowadays).
Many things people do don’t infringe on my rights. Someone murdering another person doesn’t infringe MY rights, but it is still wrong. A parent beating their child doesn’t infringe my rights but is still abuse.
All this being said, I support the right of a woman to receive an abortion, within reason. It is up to our elected officials to codify this right. It is not, nor should it ever be, the responsibility of the court to attempt to enshrine a right that does not exist through case law.
> Almost all states (and other countries) where abortion is legalized still have reasonable limits on when they may be performed (e.g., not after second trimester). I think we would both agree that an abortion of an otherwise viable and healthy baby one day before expected delivery would be unethical.
Your moral compass isn't accounting for the logistics of pregnancy. At any point during a pregnancy or childbirth, complications can arise which risk the mother's life, and a medical decision is most often made to save her instead of a potentially healthy child. By both medical and legal definition, this is still an abortion. To declare that it's not ethical to abort in these situations is a declaration that it is ethical to kill the mother. So, we very much do not agree that the ethics of abortion are obvious or even quantifiable.
> Many things people do don’t infringe on my rights. Someone murdering another person doesn’t infringe MY rights, but it is still wrong. A parent beating their child doesn’t infringe my rights but is still abuse.
I think you missed the point here, or I wasn't clear enough. Given that the spectrum of ethics doesn't allow for a standard threshold of "murder" and we've already established that abortions are a medical necessity, the only case against the right to abortion boils down to being personally offended by someone else's actions. If medical care can be decided by personal offense and codified into a law that is guaranteed to be harmful, then we don't actually have the freedoms described in the Constitution.
> Yes, but we are in disagreement on which rights are applicable in this case. [...] It is not, nor should it ever be, the responsibility of the court to attempt to enshrine a right that does not exist through case law.
Freedom of speech protects the moral threshold discussed earlier. Right to privacy protects medical information. Freedom of religion is based on separation of church and state, which means religious beliefs shouldn't hold any bearing at the federal level, particularly because they may directly contradict the beliefs of another religion. These are all fundamental concepts of our democracy, and it is absolutely the court's job to uphold them when challenged.
And the case law does exist (it's the one which just got overturned), so even if you were correct about the court's responsibility, then they just did the opposite of what you're purporting that responsibility to be.
"Where in our constitution and laws are these things codified as rights?"
Um, how about Roe v Wade and the TEN times the Supreme Court upheld RvW since it was decided, including as recently as 2016? The court just blew up precedent with a ten ton nuke and you're arguing hey, it was just good jurisprudence!
Do you understand the difference between the constitution and the courts? The court does not invent rights, nor should it. It is the federal government’s responsibility to codify rights, and it is the courts responsibility to affirm them.
Separate but equal was precedent for a long time as well, would you be arguing the same for that?
You're ignoring what I said, which is that a right established by the highest court, and ten times affirmed by the highest court, including as recently as 6 years ago, just obliterated that entire history in a ruling that is guaranteed to carry a toll in human health and human lives.
"The court does not invent rights, nor should it."
It has established many specific rights that are not articulated in the Constitution or codified in laws. Most still stand.
"Separate but equal was precedent for a long time as well, would you be arguing the same for that?"
I'm confused, how many vulnerable women died as a result of that?
> You're ignoring what I said, which is that a right established by the highest court, and ten times affirmed by the highest court, including as recently as 6 years ago, just obliterated that entire history in a ruling that is guaranteed to carry a toll in human health and human lives.
All of this posturing is irrelevant to the fact that the right which was granted did not follow from the arguments being made. Our courts should follow sound reasoning when establishing unenumerated rights. They also should not care about what the impact would be downstream of their decisions; their reasoning should stand on its own.
> It has established many specific rights that are not articulated in the Constitution or codified in laws. Most still stand.
And some no longer do.
> I'm confused, how many vulnerable women died as a result of that?
Impossible to say, but it had to be a non-negligible amount. Either way, that has no bearing on which way the court should rule.
The laws represent the will of the people via their elected representatives. The court adjudicates these laws and their validity as it relates to our constitution.
"They also should not care about what the impact would be downstream of their decisions; their reasoning should stand on its own."
Do we live in the same reality? As the dissenting justices stated, "The majority's refusal even to consider the life-altering consequences of reversing Roe and Casey is a stunning indictment of its decision."
Judges are not law-interpreting robots and no one ever pretended they are supposed to be (until you I guess). Their decisions impact the health and welfare of hundreds of millions of human beings and to not incorporate that reality into their work would be monstrously inhumane. There is a long history of rulings directly referencing the impact of decisions, to argue otherwise is a lie or disingenuous.
I'm pro-choice as well and think this was the right decision. Roe created a Constitutional right that didn't exist. All this does today is correct that mistake.
As a big believer in states' rights, I"m glad to see more rights returned to their voters and legislatures. As was frequently told to me, "If you don't like it, you can move to another state." And I did.
Furthermore, this decision gets rid of the viability precedent so more extreme liberals states are now free to pass all the 3rd tri-mester up-until-the-moment-of-birth abortion laws they want, free of any potential legal challenges.
This gives states and their voters, the citizens, the people the right to choose. And I'm all for that.
(edited) It's not like you had any more urgent issues than this?
That move greatly reinforces Galkovsky's position that USA is now a Latin American country not unlike Brazil; and indeed, Latin American countries also deeply care about this (non)issue and have abortion laws inappropriate to their general level of economical and human development.
The problem being, at least Brazil recognizes that it is Brazil and knows how to run Brazil.
It's a simple vote exchange, you know. People got triggered badly by Roe and "liberal" rulings that actually enshrined the right of women to have a sexual life and control their own life, so they made a pact with the Republicans to overturn it. In exchange for that, the Republicans had a free hand to cut taxes to rich people and ensure that poor people stayed poor.
I wish we saw more comparison between the US and Latin America in online discourse. There is an excess of references and analogies made to the emotionally salient topics of the US Civil War, the Civil rights period and Europe from 1918 to 1945 when discussing the current American situation and a dearth of comparison to Latin America. The frequent comparison of Trump to a dictator instead of to a populist president in the Latin American mold is an example.
In practice, this ruling bans abortion in those states. Regardless of your opinion of those states, people DO live in them and will be adversely affected. Lives will be ruined, people will die, and ultimately this will probably be counterproductive wrt lowering the number of abortions overall.
I mean isn't that the will of the people in that state? If you live in a state that will be affected, it could certainly be a problem for you. If you don't then you are wanting to subvert their democratic process, no?
Imagine if it was something else like marijuana legalization and whatnot.
> I mean isn't that the will of the people in that state?
That really depends on when those laws were passed, and whether attitudes have changed since then, doesn't it?
Most of these laws weren't passed last year, and the issue has been legislatively moot for 50 years, so you're going to have a very hard time convincing me that those laws represent the current will of the people in every state.
> you are wanting to subvert their democratic process, no?
Yes. I believe there are and should be restrictions on what the majority of a state can pass.
I do want to subvert the democratic process in some specific instances. For example, if the majority of a state I didn't live in wanted to legalize slavery, I would say that they do not get that choice and that they may not.
It's not like this is groundbreaking. There are all kinds of federal laws that preempt state laws on various topics.
Pretty sure CA just had the will of its voters thrown out just yesterday relating to their gun laws, so maybe it's not so sacrosanct.
Some states are pretty big, and have diverse populations- maybe we should make it the choice of the county! Then again, some counties are pretty big, maybe we should make it the choice of the city or town! Then again, some cities are pretty big, maybe we should make it the choice of the block! Then again, there might be a lot of differing opinions even on a single block, maybe we should make it a choice of the individual!
Personally I think this is a good thing. My hope is that SCOTUS passing rulings down from the federal level to the states will encourage more (young) people to vote in their city and state elections. The voter turnout for presidential elections is always decent, however for local and state issues there's a clear difference in number of voters. Additionally, younger people don't vote as often in local and state elections. I wish it was not true but there's no arguing the statistics.
The US senate is 2 senators per state. The smaller states are mostly rural conservative issues. The senators that confirmed the three trump justices represent 43% of the population.
"Just vote with the people that won't ban abortion" in insufficient in a system with an undemocratic Senate. The Senate controls who gets on the Supreme Court, and it requires 60 votes to advance legislation.
Because in contrary to the states' rights argument being touted, the legal theory underpinning the decision opens the door to a federal ban. You might not get the chance to vote for the people that ban abortion for you.
In many states that has no effect whatsoever because district boundaries have been gerrymandered to ensure that the party that favors banning abortion will not lose control of the legislature.
I am fine with this contrarian argument, but why does it stop at birth? There’s no support (universal healthcare for children, paid maternity/paternity leave, etc etc). Conservatives apply these arguments inconsistently.
I know that's what the post says. But that's not the actual equivalent. If we had free healthcare just for pregnant women, then it would be fair to say we should give free healthcare to children too, but we don't.
The fact that there is no free healthcare for pregnant women demonstrates that noone actually cares about the child's life.
It demonstates that you are willing to force a woman to carry the child of a rapist against her will (so it's not her choice) and then have her give birth without medical assitance if she can't afford hospital stay, potentially resulting in the death of the child and the mother.
it shows what the game is really about - control over women
Actively supporting/helping vs not killing/preventing others from killing are pretty significantly different moral arguments. This always comes across as "If you're against abortion then why don't you support insert political position that involves drastically raising taxes and giving way more power to the state?"
You’re just describing a trolly problem. If you believe a foetus has more right to autonomy than the person carrying it, but you don’t believe in making sure that all children have what they need to survive, you’re avoiding “killing” by direct action in favor of killing by neglecting to act.
As for paying for it… no taxes need to be raised. Just divert 1/1000th of the money going to the military.
Except the child's death isn't guaranteed if we fail to implement universal healthcare/free school lunches/insert welfare program here, so it's not really a normal trolley problem. And that's before you get into potential adverse second order effects of such programs.
>Just divert 1/1000th of the money going to the military.
GP mentioned universal healthcare as one of the ways in which to support children after birth, I don't think $800 million is going to be enough to cover it.
I'm not sure how one can call a woman carrying a child something other than "actively supporting/helping" that child. So this amounts to a hypocrisy where it's OK for the state to have power to force a person to keep another person[1] alive for ~9 months, but somehow wrong for the state to contribute resources to this effort.
I'm also not sure how giving the power to pry into people's reproductive decisions is somehow less state power than administrative power to distribute resources.
[1] That's accepting the argument that a fetus is technically a person, which can also be debated.
I suspect people exist who are both pro-life and also pro-social safety net. You're falling into the trap created by the two political party system: binary thinking.
People exist who satisfy any imaginable criteria - one guy cut out his own appendix with a kitchen knife and lived. What does that prove, we should be our own surgeons?
The key questions is, how many of such peope exist.
It’s a surface level protection. Forcing someone to bring an unwanted child into this world is not enlightened. There’s a reason why women and couples opt for abortion. They’re often not ready for that responsibility, and it’s the kid who suffers most.
Life for the sake of life feels like virtue signaling, especially since those who espouse it have no interest in providing social programs to help these mothers and couples raise the kid they were forced to have. That’s pretty barbaric.
Congratulations. You saved a life you almost immediately stop giving a shit about.
One could argue that every living human — all of us — are a product of generations of rape and unwanted children whose lives no one cared about, who survived to have their own. Civilized humans who enjoyed enforced women’s rights are a laughably short segment of all human history.
If anything, reflecting on the stress and violence of our collective ancestors should only further strengthen the desire to do better by supporting things like "enforced women’s rights". Was that your point?
We're also the product of generations of people dying prematurely of diseases like polio; our lives would be quite a bit different if infant/child mortality had been 0% for the last 100k years.
Should we not wipe out polio because our ancestors couldn't?
I'll sign you up to take care of those kids, then. Just feel free to email me your full legal name and address (see my profile), and I'll hire a lawyer to figure out how to make that happen. I might even offer to pay for the costs for the child you adopt doing this for the first year if you act fast!
> Forcing someone to bring an unwanted child into this world is not enlightened.
> They’re often not ready for that responsibility
So they could have used condoms, the man could have avoided ejaculating where it could cause pregnancy, or they could also just not have sex or the woman could take pills or an IUD. Unless it was rape, nobody forced them to have a child.
I do agree that there should be programs that help the parents more.
How do you feel about rape victims who are unable to prove they were raped in court and are forced to co-parent the rest of their life with their rapist?
Or what about rape cases which take longer than 9 months to reach a conviction?
Rape is hard to prove and it doesn't necessarily mean co-parenting with the rapist, I think it's even more likely that he avoids responsibility and escapes than become a parent.
And the second issue seems to be an issue of bureaucracy and it's slowness.
Those cases are both valid where I think most people would argue it's not as clear cut but I think they are mostly the exception, not the rule.
Clarence Thomas said we should reconsider contraception as a right, which according to your logic essentially means we should reconsider sex except for having a child as a right. You can't advocate for personal responsibility and then take away all mechanisms to conduct it.
I don't even know who Clarence Thomas is. It sounds like he is religious to me which as far as I know allows sex for procreation only, not for pleasure. Maybe I am wrong tho. Whoever he is, I can agree with some of his views while disagreeing with others.
Come on. Nobody that supported this ruling except the deluded give a damn about life or whatever they were preaching. The Republicans only care about getting the votes they need to maintain their stranglehold over red states, cut taxes and environmental protections for the benefit of their patrons. The fundamental Christians only care about seeing the rights of women being repelled, there are zero concerns about the life of children, otherwise they would be pushing for free childcare, support for mothers, parental leave, ....
It's all a matter of punishing women for their own desire to be emancipated, it's a punishment for those women who have sinned by thinking they could act like a man and have sex whenever they wanted. If they truly cared about the unborn, they would
1. care about the already born, first, and
2. push for the widespread availability of contraception.
Given that contraception is bad for them, too, it's clear this is not an ethical question, but a moral one: sex outside of marriage, or for pleasure really, should not be allowed, and it must always carry consequences, no matter if it vastly more impacts women than it does men. You know, a man can always run from their responsibilities, while a woman cannot run away from her womb.
> The Republicans only care about getting the votes they need to maintain their stranglehold over red states, cut taxes and environmental protections for the benefit of their patrons.
As has been pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, we don't vote for Supreme Court justices. There's no leverage to impose electoral or party pressure on a justice who has already been appointed, unless it is by impeachment. Your assessment of their motivations doesn't hold up.
Are you naive or what? Republicans have lists of candidates for justices that they have deemed so anti roe-vs-wade that they deemed safe to propose for justices. Someone like Thomas is not going to change his mind once he is appointed...
Why not, if he's now free to act as he pleases? The assertion is that he doesn't believe he's acting rightly, but does so under electoral pressure. If I'm naive, please explain: what's to stop him doing as he thinks is right, now that he's appointed?
Your naïveté lies in the fact that you don’t realize that Supreme Court justices are elected by proxy of voting for the president that nominated them and the senators that confirm them.
It stands to reason that on average, if you elect conservative presidents and senators, you will get conservative justices, and vice-versa.
You seem to assert that there are wolves hiding in sheeps’ clothing, waiting until they are confirmed to show their true colors to save the country. I counter that reality is more boring than that, and that these people can be taken at face value by virtue of what they’ve said and done for decades.
Furthermore, I think yours is an apologist/denialist stance people use so they can get someone in the courts they truly approve of, while hiding behind the “hope” that they won’t be as bad as everyone else knows they will.
The only part of what you wrote that addresses my point is this:
> You seem to assert that there are wolves hiding in sheeps’ clothing, waiting until they are confirmed to show their true colors to save the country
Against this characterization I would oppose John Roberts, who was appointed by a Republican president, but has been reluctant to create any non-trivial precedent on topics that figure in the Republican platform. There's a lot of anger among Republican voters over that, but what can they do? They can't vote him out, he is not beholden to the Republican party, and he's done nothing impeachable.
I understand how this can be difficult to perceive from outside, especially if you happen to be in a bubble that perceives Republicans as uniformly deplorable. But I assure you that Roberts is viewed that way. (I view them from another direction entirely.)
As far as my stance being apologist or denialist, you have no idea what I think or want.
you: “we don't vote for Supreme Court justices… There's no…electoral…pressure on a justice[‘s] motivations…”
zzleeper: “Are you naive…? Republicans have lists of candidates for justices…they have deemed…anti roe-vs-wade”
you: “If I'm naive, please explain”
This is where you lost the point, and where I explained your naïveté, an explanation you ignored in your response to me.
Your last two paragraphs consist of speculative ad hominem (judging by your profile, we have similar life circumstances, and I have many conservatives in my “bubble” ie family members) followed by a hypocritical self defense. We don’t know anything about each other outside of what we’ve said here. I’m simply calling it like I see it:
you: “Why [wouldn’t Thomas change his mind once he is appointed], if he's now free to act as he pleases?…what's to stop him doing as he thinks is right…?”
The obvious answer is that he was appointed precisely because it was expected he would act the way he has, because what he believes is right is fully aligned with who appointed him, as are the three most recent appointees. You want to point out exceptions like Roberts, but those merely prove the rule from my original explanation.
If evidence on their position was completely missing or neutral then I would agree with you. Sadly, this is far from a straw man because there is evidence that they do not care.
These are the same people who actively work against giving children school lunches, who protect racist gerrymandering, who want to defund planned parenthood, and so on.
If, in the same breath, we were talking about significantly revolutionizing support for children/families in poverty, then this would be a different discussion. Sadly, look at the polls, this is majority boomers who no longer have functioning ovaries & men whose egos demand control over women.
The parent isn't wrong. Republicans don't do shit to support "the born" who are ill or live in crushing poverty, they don't give a shit about people, they give a shit about power and this is a lever they've been yanking on to get it for years.
On one hand, you are correct in that the right is more reluctant to use governmental power to improve society. That's in part because they put more emphasis on personal responsibility, and in part because they are skeptical of the government's competence.
On the hand, I think the right has done more than they usually get credit for. Median real wages rose significantly under Trump. [1] Nixon created the EPA. [2] At an individual level, conservatives donate significantly more to charities, and give blood more often. [3]
Christians do give a lot to charity, but a lot of those are christian charities that give aid on the condition that you eat a heaping mouthful of bullshit. It's really just a feel good way for them to try and proselytize.
> give aid on the condition that you eat a heaping mouthful of bullshit
I don't have any stats on that, but it's contrary to my personal experience. When I was a student, there was this Pentecostal group which used to give free food to everyone every Thursday. It was quite unconditional, not even means tested.
It seems like if they want to emphasize personal responsibility, they could stop trying to influence laws that prevent people from getting abortions or using contraception.
While I won't try to argue with you because abortion is the thing we won't see eye to eye on, what bout the 'or' on contraception, or do you think that responsible people only think that sex is for making babies?
On another thought, you think the best thing to do is give people you judge as irresponsible a child? Also, doesn’t original sin mean the fetus not innocent? Is innocence really the important measure? Because lots of things are innocent we don’t care about.
I don't have any particular problems with contraception. Some right-wingers do, they should speak for themselves. (I'm also not against early-stage abortions)
> On another thought, you think the best thing to do is give people you judge as irresponsible a child?
It's not ideal, it's just better than normalizing taking innocent lives. Also, if someone really thinks they can't be a good parent, putting up the baby for adoption is always an option.
> Also, doesn’t original sin mean the fetus not innocent?(which of course doesn't really apply since it's not a person)
I'm not religious, so I don't really think about the issue in terms of sins in the religious sense.
That is kind of a weird argument and I assume you don't understand the antiabortion position. People who are opposed to abortion think it is murder. If somebody supports personal responsibility that doesn't mean they think we shouldn't have murder laws.
You may disagree with the idea it is murder, but if it is in fact murder than it is completely consistent to support laws against it.
Biologically life begins at conception [1] [2]. A human fetus has been conceived. Therefore a human fetus is a human life. Unjustly and deliberately killing a human is murder.
You may disagree with some of the premises but they follow one another and have decent reasons to believe them. That is hardly irrational.
Something to keep in mind. If you want to actually convince somebody in the future, saying their views are as irrational as believing the Earth is flat isn't the best way.
How do you even define "life" biologically? Two "living" things combine to form a fetus, and just a few months down the line none of the physical matter of those living things still comprises the growing fetus. The thing that is being terminated isn't a human, it's the potential of a human, which is also the thing that is flushed down the toilet when a used condom is disposed of.
Forced birthers are crazy, full stop. A fertilized egg is not a human any more than a sperm is a human.
Yesterday you've decided that hydatidiform mole is a human.
And here you're making the same mistake again: you're assuming that if someone disagrees with your ideas about biology it means they don't understand it. In reality the reverse is true - pro-life myths might make sense to a high schooler, but not to someone who actually understands the topic.
Yet you missed the obvious fact that science doesn't even have a good definition for life, in fact it's a hard problem in the philosophy of science. You could say that the replicating mass of cells will in the future become a human being and that is not true of a sperm (unless it later goes on to fertilize an egg), but a sperm is just as "alive" as a fertilized egg.
If you have some sperm cells laying around they won't grow into a human. If you have a fertilized egg it will (assuming the process completes normally).
Again, this doesn't matter to the discussion. Even if they were fully grown humans this wouldn't "override" pregnant person's right to decide about their own body.
(Also, you're conflating 'being homo sapiens' with 'being a person'; you've already tried this method of derailing the discussion two days before.)
>Does it mean a parent can be forced to donate an organ for transplant for their child?
I am not who you were responding to, but since we were talking previously I will remind you what I said before. You are not obligated to provide what people need above the basic necessities. Organ donations go beyond that.
This argument is based on a logical fallacy equating "human" with "person". It's yet another example of an attempt to derail the discussion.
>You may disagree with some of the premises but they follow one another
You can say the exact same thing about antivaxers.
>If you want to actually convince somebody in the future, saying their views are as irrational as believing the Earth is flat isn't the best way.
Honestly, I don't think I can convince a flat-earther or pro-lifer. This kind of brainwashing appears to be unfixable. What can be done is limiting the spread.
I can understand this argument, however in this specific case we are forcing children onto parents who are in bad positions to raise them (or most wouldn't consider abortion), and our state does a terrible job at providing support to kids throughout their lives (healthcare, education, welfare programs are all notorious in the US) in the case where parents aren't reliable.
As a pro-choice person, I could be convinced against abortion _if_ there was a guarantee that every child would have the full resources of the government to help them achieve a successful life. We all know that isn't going to happen.
So without the appropriate follow-through, this is actually less enlightened and hurting both parents and children more.
> I could be convinced against abortion _if_ there was a guarantee that every child would have the full resources of the government to help them achieve a successful life. We all know that isn't going to happen.
Kids brought up with bad parents will be somewhat similarly disadvantaged. Why should potentially bad parents (eg. heavy drug addicts) not be banned from having kids? Both of them would be "forcing children onto parents who are in bad positions to raise them".
CPS can take kids from parents who are bad parents (drug addicts) just as they can take kids from parents who don't want the kids (and presumably would have aborted the kid if they could have).
Unless it's young life that's already living and happens to be impregnated via rape? Then fuck her, right? Force her to give birth?
And exactly how does banning an abortion when the pregnancy is not viable for any number of reasons (molar pregnancy, ectopic pregnancy, anencephaly) help anyone? Why are we forcing women to carry dead fetus's around in their bodies?
Because that's what a total ban on abortion does. It also makes IVF illegal if "life begins at conception".
The notion that the only abortions happening are happy couples who find out they're pregnant, tell their friends and family, plan parties, and then in some sinister plot months later wake up and casually decide "you know what, let's just kill it" is absurd.
Not all life is equal, and not all human life is equal. If you were driving down the street and two buildings were on fire, a IVF clinic with viable implanted eggs, and a preschool full of living children, you would 100% of the time try and rescue the preschoolers if you only had time for one. The idea that all human life down to a recently implanted egg has the same value as an 11 year old girl who's been raped and wants an abortion is an untenable position.
As a non-American, non-Christian, I find the entire fiasco quite weird. Like a lot of cases in the US, why don't they address the core issue? If rape is so common, how about punish the rapists like other advanced countries do? Yes, including the death penalty for serial rapists or repeat offenders.
Because that's a reactive punishment that does absolutely nothing to help out the woman who might be carrying a fetus post rape, not to mention the fact that rape is already illegal and a rapist isn't exactly going to be deterred by the fact that there's illegality involved. The issue of abortion also touches upon things like ectopic pregnancies where the woman can/will die if an abortion is not performed.
> rapist isn't exactly going to be deterred by the fact that there's illegality involved
Controversial opinion, prisons aren't a deterrent, corporal punishment would leave a more lasting impression and instill fear into would be offenders. It would also be more cost effective and efficient.
You're straw manning. Not all crimes should have the death penalty. But severe abhorrent ones like killing, spreading of chaos (i.e. "terrorism"), or some other abhorrent obvious ones. We see that in countries that do apply the death penalty for such crimes, they have much lower of those crimes compared to those that don't. And they've done it for over 1000 years.
It's very uncommon where I am. Rape is severely punished. There are many countries like this, we're not "liberal" countries so they don't align with the Western media agenda.
I would have no problem with this line of argument if it was honest and genuine, but it's not - it's a pretence.
If prolife movement actually cared about protecting life, they would not support policies that leave children to die of terrible diseases if their family can't afford healthcare.
Pregnancy has nontrivial effects on women. There is risk of death, emotional and physical changes to the body, and you need to adapt your life around these things. In the case of rape there is also trauma. It seems incredibly unjust to rob the mom of the choice to decide what to do in that situation. Having a position that ignores the mom in favor of the baby is terrifying.
The legal question here is whether the federal government of the United States, absent legislation, is able to compel the states to allow abortions up to a certain time window of pregnancy.
The ruling today says that the federal government does not have that power, absent legislation. But by the same token, it also could not BAN abortion absent federal legislation.
Others have commented on the weakness of the original "penumbral reasoning" of Roe v. Wade decision establishing the government's ability to do this, and that this criticism is recognized by judges commonly perceived to be on either side of the political spectrum.
A lens with which to view this decision through is the correction of technical debt, and it's really not that remarkable from a legal perspective.
It's very remarkable from a social perspective, considering many of us have grown up in a Roe v. Wade world.
But this returns the burden to states. In my state, today's ruling changes nothing, as abortion is protected by our state constitution. In other states, there's some political work to do assuming the citizenry in those states agrees that things should be different.
If there's actually a consensus opinion on abortion in the US across enough states, federal legislation could be created some day. By design, federal legislation is a slow process - it's designed to be inefficient. One of the biggest liberal criticisms of Roe v. Wade is that it stopped the process cold, and we've lost decades of time to have that conversation about legislation in trade for a decision on very weak legal footing, which many have argued was long overdue for correction.
From my vantage point, the questions you raise are immaterial to the legal issue decided in the SCOTUS. This decision was one about the structural relationship between the states and the federal government. The questions you raise are relevant to the state politics that need to take place going forward, for sure. But it comes back to this question - if the majority of people in a state believe that abortion past some point in time (1w, 14w, 24w, pick one) constitutes murder, should they not be allowed to have their state law reflect that? We believe other nations have that power for diverse views on the matter - France, I believe, doesn't allow abortions after 14w (it was merely 10 up until 2000). When evaluating law in the US, a key premise is the idea that the US is a collection of states that outsources certain functions to a central government, not a singular government with separate census areas.
Except that states banning abortions after X weeks was already a thing under Roe.
And this decision was not about any "state rights" bullshit. The court previously found an unenumerated right to an abortion, and now they completely reversed themselves. Women do not have complete body autonomy and must support another life no matter the impact on their own.
I think there is huge question of right of mother as well. Lets take hypothetical situation where someone forcibly mates two humans together in such a way that removing other would kill that other. Per anti-abortion people they would have to live together forever. Which seems bit sick...
Appreciate it, but it was a glib way of saying evidence needed not citation. I know that thing was said - but I din’t believe it to be backed up by historical evidence
> There's this belief that society always moves in a "forward/upward" directory
That's the central fallacy of Whig historiography [1]. It is in part facilitated by the fact that recent history is often written by the victors.
MLK repeated the same fallacy: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Is that the same arc that included two world wars?
Just for some context, I once heard commentary about MLK that suggested that that specific statement was made in more of a spiritual tradition than a practical or historical tradition.
Ya that's a really good point and I think about it often.
Look at Iraq, the cradle of civilization, the seat of Babylon. And Egypt. And even Greece to an extent. Former glories of the world but they aren't the most glorious places in the world now.
This assumes there is a universally agreed upon definition of "upward" and "forward". Religious people would argue things like abortion rights and pride celebrations are the opposite of upward and forward progress since they enable and encourage what they believe to be sin.
These are the same people who think the world is 6000 years old, the first man was made out of mud and the first woman was made from the rib of the first man. They're clearly insane so their view of forward should be thrown in the garbage.
It is interesting to note that while American's attitudes on many social issues like gay marriage or racial injustice have moved in a progressive direction, American's attitudes on abortion haven't budged since the 1970s.
Your comment is quite mild given that from the outside the last years it really looks like the US is sliding slowly towards autocracy. The tendencies are there. I've asked myself if it's not the case that the largest threat to peace and progress & good quality of life for the western world long term does not lie in the balance of how it goes in the US and what I can do about this - just to ensure the best for my life and those I care for.
Bad generalization and prejudice right there. While whether someone is brought up in an environment that encourages care absolutely influences the choices people make down the road, whether the person in question was "wanted" does not matter. I can't exactly back that up with some solid data but i think that many people know someone who is far from being an "unwanted" person but still made some bad choices in life.
I believe there have been social studies showing the positive impact to crime by increasing access to abortion. I don’t have citations or the time to look them up now, but I am pretty sure it is referenced in Freakonomics and possibly one of Gladwell’s books.
There's no way to tell for sure, because it's such a broad statistic. Other people have opined that the removal of lead gasoline was also a reason of the drop in crime rates. No one really knows what is causing it.
The study you’re speaking of (abortion lowering crime rates by preventing unwanted children from terrorizing the streets) remains unproven at best, despite oft being cited as settled research[0]
Thank you. We'll figure it out in 20 years time if no federal law will be instated. The data from pro/contra abortion states can then be correlated with the crime differential in those states. Through that I guess it can then either be shown plausible or implausible. We'll see.
For anyone interested, the book Freakonomics had a chapter devoted to studying this as a factor that lead crime to drop from its peak in the early 90s US, approximately 20 years after Roe v Wade.
Kind of a provocative study and you could make a similar case for leaded gasoline and other factors but nevertheless interesting.
3,736 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 581 ms ] threadEDIT: Abortion is not in the Constitution in any way, it's not a right.
The second that Republicans have a majority in Congress and the Presidency, they will pass a federal ban on abortion in all the states.
They may want to. I’m skeptical. But it’s unconstitutional.
The members of the Court that claim to be pick and choose which material they're originalist or textualist regarding, particularly in this case. Others are just idealogues nominated and confirmed to be political tools of the Republican party. You should not have faith in them, their credibility is shot.
"reproductive healthcare", correct.
"mothers killing their own babies in the womb", also correct.
Echoes of Babel.
EDIT: I'm not sure what you mean by that. Are you upset about SCOTUS citing common law tradition? Most of our law works that way, you have to build on something. Even "reason" needs axioms and you have to find a way to pick those.
EDIT2: There are a surprising number of people who want to decriminalize theft and even murder in some situations (look up "mutual combat" in Chicago.)
Wasn't there just a thread here a few days ago that had a bunch of people arguing that the decriminalization of shoplifting in San Francisco is a good thing?
Missouri tried. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/03/us-abortions-t...
Also if you keep calling conservatives Nazis eventually they might start wondering why, they might start remembering and noticing things you'd rather they forget.
That's the difference between rights and privileges -- As of this week I can't vote away your your right to carry concealed weapon in my city, but you can vote to take away my access to abortion, or even contraception in yours?
SCOTUS has said that states may decide how to regulate it. Individual states will either ban, or not, as their constituents wish.
The next step is clearly to advocate for explicit legislation.
The Supreme Court invented a personal right to bear arms from a 250 year old amendment during my lifetime and is now not only ignoring words that are in there but adding words that aren’t
Anyone trying to apply logic to this is just facilitating nonsense because these decision are based in ideology not logic. Don’t launder it for them.
So there you go, freedom for Christian's not for anyone else, a good Christian nation! /s
The current administration had a majority in both houses, knew this decision was coming, yet did nothing.
Does nobody read history anymore?
Without taking any side on this issue: this is a tough day in America, when a 50-year precedent is overturned.
Same energy. This ruling today has more in common with Dred Scott (reduces citizens back down to property because of founder intent or something) than the overturning of it.
Perhaps the grandparent was suggesting that was a likely outcome here as well?
There were many (tens) obituaries written for the people who went to live on for more years or are are still living.
Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they had found out earlier just like previous decisions have been leaked.
Edit: downvoted for stating a fact
In 1954 median house price was 19k and gdp per capita was $2,400 (so 8x)
So yeah I’ll take the current economy please.
Also there are a ton of different stats for median house price and 19k I can only find on a single source, the rest is a lot lower
There are drugs that will allow women to have illegal abortions that are much much safer than a coat hanger. The important factor will be finding ways to get such drugs to women in states where they cannot be legally used, and ensuring that such a delivery mechanism delivers safe, and authentic drugs.
It's going to be very difficult to regulate all of these drugs.
For example, pills can be acquired safely from outside of the jurisdiction and mailed in.
Or, many such pills have on-label uses that are not abortion related. So there could be avenues to helping people who need them for abortion purposes obtain them from reputable providers for legal purposes.
But, yes, the war on drugs has shown that trying to police drugs out of the system is incredibly difficult.
I'd just like to make sure that, once the war ramps up, we can find ways to keep the delivery of the drugs as timely, authentic, and the use of them as safe as possible.
In total, the opinions are 217 pages long.
Anyone able to quickly run a diff on the leaked majority opinion and the official one?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2690604/
> Quickening, the point at which a woman feels life, was used to determine fetal viability.
That's 16-20 weeks, a far more liberal standard than the bans going into practice now.
> By the end of 1868, 30 to the then 37 states had passed laws restricting abortion.
That's not all states.
https://twitter.com/fordm/status/1540338064324698112
This isn't about originalism. This is about the sitting judges' religious beliefs.
This is the droid you're looking for: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099542962/abortion-ben-frank...
It reiterates the thesis of the first article: "It just wasn't something to be remarked upon. It was just a part of everyday life."
> Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was a landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia
Substantive due process is far shakier. It's Justices deciding what rights they think people should have and then working backwards as best they can to justify them. The back to back gun rights & abortion rulings lays it bare. There's just no intellectually honest way of finding a right to an abortion but not a right to bear arms.
IMHO, the substantive due process was the wrong way about this. It was a shaky foundation and as more rights were found the logic got shakier. They should have used the right to peacefully assemble and based most of these substantive due process cases on them.
This is literally 99% of a Supreme Court justice's job.
Here it is in its entirety:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Please point out the part of that amendment that references the right of people to have concealed carry for the purposes of self defense. Because it seems to me that they tried to be as obtuse and textualist as can possibly be with regards to Roe, but apparently the second amendment grants all sorts of rights that don't actually exist in the Constitution.
Interracial marriage has existed for pretty much all of human history (though race as a concept likely didn't, at least not the way it is perceived in modern times). Heck you even have Moses marrying an Ethiopian woman and his siblings spoke out against him over it and were punished by God for it (see Numbers chapter 12).
Gay marriage, on the other hand, has near zero historical precedence outside of a few cases with Roman emperors and stuff like that.
The approach that Thomas favors is "text, history, and tradition". The words - as written - taken in light of what the author(s) intended and what was happening at the time.
As best I can tell it would be entirely legal for the US government to sell someone sentenced to life in prison to a private party.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/abortion-ethics-ge...
Gay marriage has existed for as long as marriage has, it’s just best documented when it involves emperors.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_same-sex_marriag...
But you know what doesn’t have a long historical precedence? Automatic weapons, or protecting money as speech.
I’ll grant you automatic weapons though
You're describing the "living constitution"[1] view, which has not been the dominant position among Supreme Court justices for some time.
Now they're all "strict constructionists"[2], who think the opposite of what you describe: that the constitution should be interpreted just as it was written.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Constitution
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_constructionism
It has, but not as a right. The Hippocratic oath specifically bans it:
> Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion.
— Hippocratic Oath (AD 275, or earlier)
This sounds like it needs a source.
As far as I understand, anti-abortion laws started getting traction in the 1800s. Before that, these were scattered and mostly religious inspired. Also, Hammurabi doesn't make any references to voluntary abortions.
The court found otherwise, you can read the majority's evidence in their opinion at https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf starting on page 17:
"The “eminent common-law authorities (Blackstone, Coke, Hale, and the like),” Kahler v. Kansas, 589 U. S. ___, ___ (2020) (slip op., at 7), all describe abortion after quickening as criminal. Henry de Bracton’s 13th-century treatise explained that if a person has “struck a pregnant woman, or has given her poison, whereby he has caused abortion, if the foetus be already formed and animated, and particularly if it be animated, he commits homicide.” 2 DeLegibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae 279 (T. Twiss ed. 1879); see also 1 Fleta, c. 23, reprinted in 72 Selden Soc. 60–61 (H. Richardson & G. Sayles eds. 1955) (13th-century treatise)."
They go on for a few pages going over common law before discussing the historical record in the US.
> Interracial marriage has existed for pretty much all of human history
is not the answer to the question originalism is asking. It asks whether there is a historical precedence for protecting that action as a right.
You don't need to look any farther than this very ruling! Abortion has been practiced since the beginning recorded history (and likely much longer) and books like the bible even instruct you on how to perform one. That history has no bearing on Alito or Thomas.
Not really, that depends on which translation of Numbers 5 you're looking at. It's not clear at all that the "Ordeal of Bitter Water" was supposed to induce a miscarriage.
to be clear, its pretty irrelevant to the argument because the bible is just one such example of the history of abortion. There are hundreds more and if it would help you can pretend I mentioned one of those instead.
Unsure if you're presenting that as the human history that exists "in Thomas's mind" or actual history
That would be an anomaly in setting judicial precedent. If legal precedent was formally acknowledged for historical reasons, then we would be having a really long conversation on civil rights, _all_ civil rights.
And the issue may not be gay marriage, but straight up sodomy laws, which were introduced as religious inspired laws, most extensively Judeo-Christian. For these to stand, we would need to ignore the separation of church and state.
It has been abundantly clear to everyone that a black man can impregnate a white woman. And a black woman can have children with a white man. If this act (reproduction) is what marriage is about, then the sexes are not equal, and thus not worthy of equal protection. A man cannot impregnate a man. Whereas, any race can impregnate / be impregnated by any other race as far as we can tell.
If you have evidence to the contrary (that both sexes are identical when it comes to reproduction, which is the historical view of marriage Thomas may adhere to; or that various races cannot interbreed), then please do share.
> However, if one views marriage as a precursor to reproduction -- the historical view of marriage...
The historical purpose of marriage is the exchange/pursuit of status and resources[1]. Reproduction was an inevitable outcome of lack of contraceptives. The idea of reproduction being the primary purpose of marriage is pretty recent.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200505/marriage-...
Historically, and actually still today, if you have actual reasons you can't conceive (for example, if a man cannot get an erection due to permanent and incurable impotence), then yes, the marriage can be declared anulled. Annulment is different from divorce because it makes it such that the marriage never existed at all at anytime. In other words, yes, certain conditions preventing conception can be used to claim that a marriage was fraudulent.
In certain legal jurisdictions, a castrated man cannot marry. While that may not always be true today, it has been the case historically. Prior to the modern day, people did operate under the assumption that those who certainly could not conceive could not marry, but of course, they didn't have the full understanding of conception we do.
> The historical purpose of marriage is the exchange/pursuit of status and resources
Yes, and the purpose of status and resources is to pass those along to your children. Also your article mainly talks about 'love' and marriage not reproduction.
> The idea of reproduction being the primary purpose of marriage is pretty recent.
This is completely baseless. Thomas Aquinas writes about the purpose of marriage as being for procreation. Given that at the time he wrote he represented an organization that represented the majority of moral thought in Europe... it's hard to actually believe these ridiculous claims. Moreover, status and resources were the main pursuit of the rich. The poor still married... usually for kids.
Source: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/5049.htm
> It would seem that the "sacrament" is not the chief of the marriage goods. For the end is principal in everything. Now the end of marriage is the offspring. Therefore the offspring is the chief marriage good.
Given that Aquinas is also pulling from historical sources (in this cases the Sentences by Peter Lombard), it's extremely likely this idea -- written very clearly in the 13th century -- originated well before then. What's modern is the claim that the chief aim of marriage in previous centuries was status / resources. Everyone in previous centuries understood that the way in which marriage produced those goods was children. A woman from one family marrying into another noble family would have little claim over her new status if the couple were unable to produce offspring. If a man had no offspring to inherit, the status and resources would end.
MORE SOURCES FROM EVEN EARLIER
In the 5th century, Augustine of Hippo clearly indicates in his treatise 'On the Good of Marriage' that offspring are one of three benefits of marriage (along with faithfulness and the sacrament of matrimony itself). In the summa, Aquinas attempts to argue which of these is the 'chief' good of marriage. Thomas believes the sacrament of matrimony itself is the chief good. Now, most here don't necessarily have the religious view of marriage (nor do they need to), but aside from the sacrament, it's faithfulness and offspring that remain. Nowhere there is status and power. And these men are again writing on the predominant moral system of the Western world for the past thousand years.
Going to secular philosophers, Aristotle (from whom Aquinas derived a lot) also consistently writes that marriage is for children. His other aims of marriage are community stability and pleasure. Again, nowhere does status and power appear.
Couples without children can adopt children, regardless of the gender of the parents.
Here's a Utah law firm offering advice on how to annul your marriage should you have found the man you married to be unable to have sex: https://www.isfma.com/law-and-order/when-ending-a-marriage-o...
Here's a review of case law in BC from the 2000s: https://disinherited.com/family-law-matters/annulment-for-no...
Scientifically, one cannot know if you're sterile until you've tried. There's no 'test' for sterility that truly works or that there hasn't been an exception too. Legally, once a marriage is fully consummated, it's more permanent than if it weren't. Historically, a marriage that was consummated could not be dissolved and was considered permanent at that point, so even if you later found out (usually after many years) that you couldn't have kids, the marriage would continue. Similar to how old people stay married.
I'm giving an historical view on marriage. Not saying how things should be. You seem incredulous at this view, but it was the prevailing view of marriage in Europe and the West for thousands of years.
I understand your position. On your point about why people think marriage is a right… I suspect this is because, at present, many rights are coupled with marriage - visitation rights at a hospital being the classic example.
They are rearing for another battle in the gay rights culture war.
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[1] https://texasgop.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/6-Permanent-...
None of this is the will of the people.
So the issue is really what the hell is wrong with the states where the people elected feel empowered to take rights away from half their populace.
As I just said in my chosen Mastodon instance:
“Ever since today’s Supreme Court decision was leaked, some have said that this oddly might hurt the Republicans in future elections — i.e., they’ll no longer have Roe v. Wade to use against the Democrats. However, this ignores what made today possible: the power of the Christian Right, particularly those whose votes won’t be erased by some currently running for office on promising to make it harder for anti-Rightists to vote (or have their votes count).”
Those of you who don’t have a lot of exposure to that culture, and the way it has completely taken over a good chunk of American politics — not to mention one of the two major U.S. political parties — in the last forty-plus years, will find today a shock. And wait ’til you see what else they have in mind.
Of the following two forces, the Christian right and the atheist Marxist left, I promise you the latter is far more shocking, dangerous, and self-destructive to America.
Remind me which side is threatening supreme court justices right now? That looks an awful lot like insurrection: https://news.yahoo.com/protesters-descend-amy-coney-barrett-...
Remind me which side is planning to engage in acts of domestic terrorism this very weekend? https://aleteia.org/2022/06/24/department-of-homeland-securi...
And if you say something like, "these people don't represent us," You can probably guess I'll respond: the small number of men who rioted at the capitol without any actual realistic plan to perform a coup don't represent us either.
Leftist activists, unfortunately, are much smarter about what it takes to really overthrow a government, and they've been in it for the long haul for almost a century now.
People loudly protest all the time, that isn’t the same thing as “domestic terrorism” even if some property gets damaged or relatively few people get hurt. By that definition the civil rights movement would have been domestic terrorism. You know what is domestic terrorism? Firebombing abortion clinics and murdering doctors like some “Christian” right members have done.
Frankly the people who stormed the Capital are a sideshow. The real coup was directed from the highest seats of government to prevent the peaceful transition of power, and the mob was merely a minor part of the plan. The real action was in getting Pence out and selecting alternate electors illegally sent.
The protestors were breaking the law: https://www.aei.org/op-eds/protesting-at-justices-homes-is-i...
"it is unlawful to protest near a “residence occupied or used by [a] judge, juror, witness, or court officer” with the intent of influencing “the discharge of his duty,”"
What they were doing clearly amounts to intimidating the justices, including by putting them in harm's way by announcing their home addresses on the Internet.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/insurrection-politics
"Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States."
What they are doing is illegally engaging in rebellion against authority. It is insurrection.
I also can't believe you are calling this "protesting loudly":
"The DHS agent reportedly told the diocese that “large groups with cells nationwide have already been discovered ‘casing’ parishes, including here in California.”"
What they are planning to do, is, in fact domestic terrorism. Your condemnation of the right while supporting the terrorism of the left is very revealing. At least people on the right are willing to condemn both. We at least have principles.
I have condemned terrorism on the left, for example eco-terrorism (which seems to have thankfully died off). I didn’t read the DOJ notice, but it is important to note their job is to take the worst case scenario and plan for it. I haven’t seen widespread attacks on parishes and don’t honestly believe they will occur. Some insane portion of people on both sides issue a lot of dumb threats but only rarely are those threats executed on. If they do I will of course condemn them. But I will always place more emphasis on events which have actually happened, not just hypotheticals. For example the recent troubling incident in Idaho where a few dozen men with guns were headed to attack a parade. Multiple studies have shown that 90+% of domestic terrorism is linked to the right wing.
I do not support harassing judges, but I hardly think that rises to any level of insurrection. They weren’t attacking the authority of the government or even of the justice in question. I doubt most of them even intended or expected her to change her mind. Even if you are right and they were attempting to unduly influence her, that wouldn’t be undermining her authority but relying upon it.
It reflects the current reality - justices have become partisan so people believe they are entitled to treat them as any other partisan politicians, who as elected officials are required to be accountable to the people. We should prevent that. Justices not acting as naked partisans would help, as would both parties compromising and writing laws again so fewer things of import are decided by unelected justices. Controversial decisions should allow both parties share some of the blame, because any good society requires controversial decisions to be effective.
By the way, if protesting outside a justices home is insurrection, then the right is guilty again - they protested outside numerous state election officials homes to attempt to pressure them to violate their oaths to keep Trump in power. They also issued numerous death threats, which thankfully didn’t happen. And published home addresses.
We need to step down from this level of rancor and return to democracy in action. The broad public is in agreement on most things and supports reasonable compromises, but our governmental structure has stopped making them viable.
So unfortunately they seem to say violence is more likely from all sides as the result of this. Even with that, arson attacks are more serious then vandalism. So to date both sides aren’t equally indulging in violence.
FTFY
I’ve taken to defining nihilism as being so dedicated to an ephemera and philosophy, harm to real people is ignored.
This decision gives states to impact interstate business. It controls what doctors and patients can discuss. So it goes a good long way to squashing other rights in deference to pudding brains traditions. They chose not with logic but delusion.
Figurative identity preferences are being leveraged to directly control human agency.
I don’t owe coddling anyone else’s sensibilities. There is no greater good. And I hope this society collapses around us and reminds the majority how meaningless their personal self image is to others.
We have six jurists with an extremist legal view called “originalism” which is “let’s imagine I’m a white male in 1800, what would I think about X”. The first Supreme Court decision to mention originalism was in 1994, when Scalia dissented because he thought juveniles should be executed.
I'm not about to dignify such an obvious bad-faith argument as is represented by your parody of originalism.
Sounds like a good argument against allowing late term abortions, and a good argument against banning them outright.
It’s hard to believe there is such ignorance out there that pregnancy isn’t even considered an inconvenience by some men, let alone a life threatening event. If I can object to my corpse being used for organ donation to save lives, a woman should be able to object to her organs being used to support the extreme demands of a growing fetus. But now we are in the odd situation of corpses having more bodily autonomy rights than women.
This is like an 8th grade textbook understanding of US government. It doesn't actually work that way.
Just like we don’t legislate that you can’t kill plants for the sake of the plant, a fetus spends up to 18 weeks in a non-sentient state where it has no subjective experience. It doesn’t need protection since a non-sentient being can’t suffer.
Edit: it’s also worth mentioning that many abortions happen at the zygote or embryo stage, before there is even a fetus.
Any such legislation could be immediately undone if Republicans take things back.
SCOTUS could strike it down, too.
Gay marriage, which I enjoy, is not being "forced" on anyone.
A ban will affect green cards, force deportations and family breakups, and ruin the happiness of millions of Americans.
My country, which I love, is kicking me in the gut because some people are "uncomfortable".
> Acceptance of gay marriage is being forced on everyone
Wow. I'm sorry that my marriage to my loving wife is such a problem for you.
Imagine saying that again but replacing gay with Black or interracial.
Don't act like the victim because you're no longer allowed to victimize others.
Let me try this sentence with some slight adjustments and see where we end up:
- Acceptence of Black people is being forced on everyone
- Acceptence of women working outside of the home is being forced on everyone
- Acceptence of women being allowed to vote is being forced on everyone
IF you think you are a victim for having to accept other people there is no helping you.
Women I believe were always allowed to work, so I'm not sure what this example has to do with anything?
Women being allowed to vote was done via constitutional amendment, again, by the legislative branch.
If you think marriage should be redefined and repurposed so it is not primarily about rearing one's own children, then, by all means, get it redefined, but, do it via legislation, not judicial activism.
New York decided over 100 years ago that people shouldn't be allowed to conceal carry without a good reason and now a bunch of activist judges have forced concealed carry on everyone.
You could say this about almost every single civil right that hasn't been voted on in the past 60 years. Abolition of slavery, for instance.
Let's follow this line of reasoning to it's logical conclusion.
What if someone decides that acceptance of your religion, race and ethnicity is also being forcen on everyone? What if they get some funny ideas about Lebensraum?
> Tell that to bakers.
One of the most fundamental aspects of my life is being threatened, and you're worried about other people being offended.
Does my life offend you and are you using this proxy issue to more safely voice your opinion?
First, this isn't you. None of the people in this story are you.
Second, the gravity of my entire life being disrupted is far more serious.
Third, if we really want to be particular, marriage is a separate issue from commerce.
I am strictly saying it is being forced onto people in certain professions. This may or may not be justified, but it is happening.
All states with "shall issue" are still in effect because its a straight here are the requirements, if you meet them and are not a prohibited person, you get your permit.
Also, the right to bear arms is explicitly enumerated in the constitution, so taking that right away isn't up to the states. The right to an abortion is not. So it goes to each state to decide.
One person having a right to do something is not forcing it on anyone else.
> place the power back in the hands of the people.
A majority of "the people" do not agree with this decision. In fact, they were appointed by someone who did not have majority support, by a party that represents a minority of the actual population.
> The problem was activist judges making the Roe decision in the first place.
You just got a handful of judges making decisions based on their regligious beliefs. Please explain to me how you see that as different than an original decision?
The secular argument against abortion is so incredibly simple: the unborn child has the right to life just as the mother does. Government is about managing the rights of everyone and balancing them when they come in conflict.
And, finally, abortion is forced on our society in the sense that our tax dollars fund it, our tax dollars fund public schools that promote it, and, if the left have their way, insurance companies will be forced to cover it, possibly free of charge: https://noqreport.com/2021/02/09/california-bill-would-force...
> The secular argument against abortion is so incredibly simple: the unborn child has the right to life just as the mother does. Government is about managing the rights of everyone and balancing them when they come in conflict.
That’s exactly what Roe managed to do for 50 years. Now there will be about half the country where these competing rights are not balanced, but tilt entirely in the favor of the fetus to the detriment of the woman.
I'm sorry, who forced you to have an abortion?
You have the alternative of dropping from the world and stop using all things paid with your taxes.
> The left have grown militant, and increasingly want to force their world view on everyone else.
I'm curious to know exactly _what_ harms you about gay marriage or abortions, other than your feelings.
On one side, we have people gaining rights, whereas on the other, there are people who don't agree with it. And I'm having a hard time understanding why your feelings are supposed to have more weight in a society, than their rights.
You frame this in a way so it is about tax money, but frankly, there is no possible tax system where people only pay for what they want.
And I thought hallucinogens was a left-wing shtick!
> The left have grown militant
So let me get this straight, the year is 2022, when the Soviet union is gone, the Chinese Communist Party is practicing free market, the percentage of unionised workforce is the lowest it's been since 1917 and the effective corporate tax rate is the lowest it's been in 70 years - this, here, is the time of left-wing world order and militarism?
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
It is a serious flaw is the US system that issues that carry supper majority support in the public for decades have no chance of making it into the constitution.
It can't happen because 30% of republican primary voters are evangelicals, so every republican will vote against abortion protection, even if most of their constituents want it.
It would serve people better.
If state A wants to ban abortion based on what their constituency wants, isn’t that exactly how democracy works?
Griswold - contraceptives
Lawrence - same-sex sexual relations
Obergefell - same-sex marriage
Neither party has had the votes to do that in a while (2/3rds in both the House and the Senate). It must also be ratified by 3/4ths of the states (38 right now).
Not going to happen for a long time.
Edit: Quick scan show the last time a party had 2/3rds majority in both was 1965-1967 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_Stat...)
The founders had no qualms about strongly disenfranchising people. The founders were NOT good people by any measurement.
An amendment on an issue this polarizing would never get the requisite support from enough states, no to mention that it doesn’t even matter if you control three branches of government to pass an amendment, only Congress is involved in the process.
Do you really think that a Republican controlled Congress for the majority of the 2010s would have allowed such a law to remain on the books?
Do you really think no superfluous law is ever passed...? The books are full of them.
> such a law would’ve be repealed the moment republicans regain control of the congress
Maybe, or maybe it would have increased Democratic majorities and forced Republicans to face a politically dangerous repeal or even a major policy switch.
Politicians are ready to go with the flow... see for example gay marriage in the UK, which was cautiously introduced by Labour as a separate formulation and then brought into full existence, with great fanfare, by a Conservative Party that had been staunchly against it for decades prior.
A comment ago you were complaining about political theater, how is passing superfluous laws anything but political theater?
> Maybe, or maybe it would have increased Democratic majorities and forced Republicans to face a politically dangerous repeal or even a major policy switch.
This suggests to me that you aren’t very familiar with the last 50 years of American political history.
I see half of the US becoming economically fallow as a result of this decline into dystopia.
But otherwise, I agree, this will just further the red states' economic bankruptcy.
Unable to show concrete reliance on Roe and Casey them- selves, the Solicitor General suggests that overruling those decisions would “threaten the Court’s precedents holding that the Due Process Clause protects other rights.” Brief for United States 26 (citing Obergefell, 576 U. S. 644; Law- rence, 539 U. S. 558; Griswold, 381 U. S. 479). That is not correct for reasons we have already discussed. As even the Casey plurality recognized, “[a]bortion is a unique act” be- cause it terminates “life or potential life.” 505 U. S., at 852; see also Roe, 410 U. S., at 159 (abortion is “inherently dif- ferent from marital intimacy,” “marriage,” or “procrea- tion”). And to ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision con- cerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion
https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/supreme-court-abortio...
I've only skimmed the judgment, but Roberts CJ convincingly points out that there was no need for the court to completely overturn Roe. It would suffice to jettison the viability standard. Going further was completely unnecessary to decide the case.
On the other hand, Thomas J took the occasion, without having heard complete argument on the respective issues, to opine that other substantive due process rights should be reconsidered. Including Griswold (no banning controceptives), Lawrence (no banning sodomy), and Obergefell (no banning gay marriage). This is simply astounding.
The second is the sheer hypocrisy of the members of the court who decry judicial activism while, in the next breath, engaging in the same.
I wish you luck for the future, Americans.
The states can ban abortion but not ban concealed carry.
Roe vs. Wade is practically almost the same as a law that allows abortion, the other threatened precedents cited in the other comments are similarly almost laws that allow various rights, and so there is very little "upholding" of existing laws in this demolition and threatened demolition of "liberal" norms.
Politicians delegate too many decisions to the SCOTUS because they don't want to govern, well the SCOTUS isn't supposed to govern in their place.
If nothing can get done at Washington, then the problem is at Washington itself, not the supreme court.
Arguably a supreme court decision is more stable.
A constitutional amendment would be most stable but we will never get to that level of state support
What exactly are you looking for that would count as a rationale that doesn't boil down to "we think they were wrong"?
> “My criticism of Roe is that it seemed to have stopped the momentum on the side of change,” Ginsburg said. She would’ve preferred that abortion rights be secured more gradually, in a process that included state legislatures and the courts, she added. Ginsburg also was troubled that the focus on Roe was on a right to privacy, rather than women’s rights.
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/justice-ruth-bader-ginsbur...
Edit: I see you've edited your post already with a quote which is helpful.
I basically see people holding states more accountable now. State politicians who are pro-life are on notice. They can no longer cry about it and blame the federal government. The issue is now on their plate- and it's a thorny one. People need to vote.
Surely you can see the hypocrisy in only being in favour of state rights when it suits you.
Permit Requester: I want to carry a pistol outside the home for self defense reasons.
Issuer: I don't believe your self defense claims are legitimate.
Requester: Why?
Issuer: I don't have to tell you.
SCOTUS enters the chat: This is no longer allowed.
There's a big difference in how you framed it, how that journalist framed it, and what actually happened. There is no hypocrisy here.
It's liberating in a way- I don't need the whole country to subscribe to living like me or holding the same beliefs and that's okay.
I am starting to come around to that view myself. The mythology of America has been dying for some time, and accelerating dramatically in the last few decades. Without that mythology to bind us together, it may be that we are more different than we thought. Arguably the majority of people in the southeast, for example, do not share the same values as people in the northwest. Maybe they should not try.
The problem is that, between natural population growth and the rise of the internet, both the cultural plane and the physical one have largely run out of space. Figurative "midwest zealots" just cannot live their lives ignoring "coastern heathens" even if they'd like to, and viceversa. And so the fights have broken out and will likely continue for a long time.
It does not matter what people in Kentucky think. They do not have the right to an opinion on another person's life decisions. Even if every person in Kentucky, or every person on the planet believed abortion is wrong, that would not impact an individual person's right to an abortion. Abortion is outside the scope of what governments can legitimately legislate, because individuals have sovereign control over their bodies.
The other side says that the fetus is a person with rights that are being trampled. And around and around we go forever. I am personally pro choice but I do understand that this is 100% my own subjective opinion.
America is also rife with examples of the federal government intervening to protect citizens from their states — Brown v Board, or most extremely the Civil War.
"People need to vote" is insufficient for regressions on issues that affect people's livelihoods. For example, Texas has a larger democrat-voting population than many blue states, "just voting" won't do anything to improve their livelyhood in the foreseeable future.
Ahmen to that. We wouldn't be in this situation if liberals took voting as seriously as conservatives.
I've seen 100's of comments over the last year about how "I'm done voting because the student loans were not forgiven" ... I don't think the next period in America is going to go very well.
I support this ruling for this reason even though I am against outlawing abortion.
RBG thought that Roe v Wade won for the wrong reasons, but didn't want to repeal it because of the damage she knew it would cause – she wanted to roll-forward rather than roll-back.
This court, or at least the conservative majority, are very much in favour of rolling-back, and I suspect are only vaguely in favour of letting the legislature pass laws because they know that there will be challenges to those laws that they can then get involved in, meanwhile they have shifted the overton window of women's rights.
https://www.newsweek.com/ruth-bader-ginsburg-roe-wade-aborti...
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/justice-ruth-bader-ginsbur...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/05/06/ruth-bader...
Seems to me RGB did feel that ruling was weak and should have decided based on equal protections not privacy.
And they didn't rule against it because of the privacy angle. They ruled against it because they are trying to destroy the jurisprudence of substantive due process and unenumerated rights, because it serves their reactionary politics.
For the government to selectively follow laws, saying that in this case they don't apply since they don't give us the right result, makes a mockery of the very idea of having laws.
Whereas if one acts for the "wrong" reasons, then that will only rarely result in doing the "right" thing.
One can look back at the original Roe v Wade and say "The right thing was done here, the outcome was good", but having that sort of consequentialist outlook tends to blind people to the downside of having the right things done for the wrong reasons- which is as we see here, those wrong reasons can in the future easily lead to the undoing of the right thing.
The original Roe v Wade decision meant that Congress never had to pass a law that explicitly nationally legalized abortion. If they had, the current situation wouldn't exist.
Where in our constitution and laws are these things codified as rights? They are not.
In the same way, abortion is not a right. But I believe it should be. This is an issue that our elected officials must decide, not the courts.
Either way, there is no constitutional right to an abortion, and that is the fundamental issue. Call your representatives and demand them to take action on codifying the right to abortion.
Pregnancy does not, in and of itself, prevent access to medical care. So while it is a personal circumstance, it is entirely inapplicable within the context of care being intentionally prevented.
> I suppose the most similar analogy I could think of is a doctor refusing to perform a surgery which has a high chance of outright killing a patient and a smaller chance of treating the issue.
Not analogous, at all. That's a medical professional making a single medical decision based on medical information. That surgeon is not preventing the patient from finding another surgeon who will perform the procedure. Whereas what you're suggesting, is that freedom of religion should give politicians the right to make a singular blanket medical decision on behalf of everyone in their state, present and future, without any situational knowledge or medical reasoning.
It's not a constitutional right to abortion. It's a constitutional right to not have personal liberties stripped by the states which are enumerated in the Constitution. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion and right to privacy are all enumerably applicable to preserving this liberty. The ability for anyone to impose their personal religious beliefs on a population violates all of those rights.
Either way, the federal government does not grant this right, therefore it is up to states to decide.
> It's a constitutional right (9th amendment) to not have personal liberties stripped by the states which are not enumerated in the Constitution. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion and right to privacy are all enumerably applicable to preserving this liberty.
None of these rights apply to abortion. If anything, there should be an enumerated right to bodily autonomy.
The only objection anyone has to abortion is based on religious beliefs. So, you didn't need to mention it. It's the foundation of the entire issue -- that religious beliefs can be imposed on a population as law. Saying that it's irrelevant to the discussion betrays an ignorance of the subject at hand.
> None of these rights apply to abortion. If anything, there should be an enumerated right to bodily autonomy.
The enumeration does not need to specifically reference the word to be applicable. For a different example, the 4th amendment doesn't contain any verbiage about police officers opening a trunk during a traffic stop, but the declaration that they must have probable cause still applies. In the exact same way, to assert religious beliefs that affect someone else's medical care violates all of the rights I listed.
Uh…what? I am not religious (agnostic/atheist) but I object to abortion after a certain amount of time except in the cases of grave bodily harm or being the product of forced reproduction (idk what the site rules are on certain language, but I trust you understand what I mean). I believe that the unborn baby is a viable human life at some point and that abortion without a justifiable reason after that point would be equivalent to murder. I also believe many people also feel the same way I do.
> The enumeration does not need to specifically reference the word to be applicable
Yes, but we are in disagreement on which rights are applicable in this case.
That's the entire point! You're not objecting to abortion. You're objecting at some point in time and only when it's medically unjustifiable. But those moral thresholds are different for every individual and there are medically justifiable situations, which is exactly why no individual should be able to impose their personal beliefs as a law which declares those medical situations as unjustifiable.
You're welcome to have moral objections and believe they are the most correct or reasonable, but they have no bearing on the concerted efforts of religious groups and individuals to outright ban access to medical care. And that's the discussion at hand, which you keep conveniently ignoring. Many people have total opposition to all abortions in all situations and specifically for religious reasons, which is what actual, real-life politicians are implementing as we speak.
Someone else having an abortion (whether you believe it's murder or not) doesn't infringe on your rights. But you imposing your beliefs in a way that affects someone else's medical care is absolutely infringing on their rights. These are fundamental concepts of our democracy.
The religious arguments for banning all abortion for any reasons are not sound and I would not expect such laws to pass scrutiny when challenged in court (but who knows nowadays).
Many things people do don’t infringe on my rights. Someone murdering another person doesn’t infringe MY rights, but it is still wrong. A parent beating their child doesn’t infringe my rights but is still abuse.
All this being said, I support the right of a woman to receive an abortion, within reason. It is up to our elected officials to codify this right. It is not, nor should it ever be, the responsibility of the court to attempt to enshrine a right that does not exist through case law.
Your moral compass isn't accounting for the logistics of pregnancy. At any point during a pregnancy or childbirth, complications can arise which risk the mother's life, and a medical decision is most often made to save her instead of a potentially healthy child. By both medical and legal definition, this is still an abortion. To declare that it's not ethical to abort in these situations is a declaration that it is ethical to kill the mother. So, we very much do not agree that the ethics of abortion are obvious or even quantifiable.
> Many things people do don’t infringe on my rights. Someone murdering another person doesn’t infringe MY rights, but it is still wrong. A parent beating their child doesn’t infringe my rights but is still abuse.
I think you missed the point here, or I wasn't clear enough. Given that the spectrum of ethics doesn't allow for a standard threshold of "murder" and we've already established that abortions are a medical necessity, the only case against the right to abortion boils down to being personally offended by someone else's actions. If medical care can be decided by personal offense and codified into a law that is guaranteed to be harmful, then we don't actually have the freedoms described in the Constitution.
> Yes, but we are in disagreement on which rights are applicable in this case. [...] It is not, nor should it ever be, the responsibility of the court to attempt to enshrine a right that does not exist through case law.
Freedom of speech protects the moral threshold discussed earlier. Right to privacy protects medical information. Freedom of religion is based on separation of church and state, which means religious beliefs shouldn't hold any bearing at the federal level, particularly because they may directly contradict the beliefs of another religion. These are all fundamental concepts of our democracy, and it is absolutely the court's job to uphold them when challenged.
And the case law does exist (it's the one which just got overturned), so even if you were correct about the court's responsibility, then they just did the opposite of what you're purporting that responsibility to be.
Um, how about Roe v Wade and the TEN times the Supreme Court upheld RvW since it was decided, including as recently as 2016? The court just blew up precedent with a ten ton nuke and you're arguing hey, it was just good jurisprudence!
Separate but equal was precedent for a long time as well, would you be arguing the same for that?
"The court does not invent rights, nor should it."
It has established many specific rights that are not articulated in the Constitution or codified in laws. Most still stand.
"Separate but equal was precedent for a long time as well, would you be arguing the same for that?"
I'm confused, how many vulnerable women died as a result of that?
All of this posturing is irrelevant to the fact that the right which was granted did not follow from the arguments being made. Our courts should follow sound reasoning when establishing unenumerated rights. They also should not care about what the impact would be downstream of their decisions; their reasoning should stand on its own.
> It has established many specific rights that are not articulated in the Constitution or codified in laws. Most still stand.
And some no longer do.
> I'm confused, how many vulnerable women died as a result of that?
Impossible to say, but it had to be a non-negligible amount. Either way, that has no bearing on which way the court should rule.
The laws represent the will of the people via their elected representatives. The court adjudicates these laws and their validity as it relates to our constitution.
Do we live in the same reality? As the dissenting justices stated, "The majority's refusal even to consider the life-altering consequences of reversing Roe and Casey is a stunning indictment of its decision."
Judges are not law-interpreting robots and no one ever pretended they are supposed to be (until you I guess). Their decisions impact the health and welfare of hundreds of millions of human beings and to not incorporate that reality into their work would be monstrously inhumane. There is a long history of rulings directly referencing the impact of decisions, to argue otherwise is a lie or disingenuous.
As a big believer in states' rights, I"m glad to see more rights returned to their voters and legislatures. As was frequently told to me, "If you don't like it, you can move to another state." And I did.
Furthermore, this decision gets rid of the viability precedent so more extreme liberals states are now free to pass all the 3rd tri-mester up-until-the-moment-of-birth abortion laws they want, free of any potential legal challenges.
This gives states and their voters, the citizens, the people the right to choose. And I'm all for that.
That move greatly reinforces Galkovsky's position that USA is now a Latin American country not unlike Brazil; and indeed, Latin American countries also deeply care about this (non)issue and have abortion laws inappropriate to their general level of economical and human development.
The problem being, at least Brazil recognizes that it is Brazil and knows how to run Brazil.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/06/24/us/roe-wade-abortion...
Just vote with the people that won't ban abortion.
Imagine if it was something else like marijuana legalization and whatnot.
That really depends on when those laws were passed, and whether attitudes have changed since then, doesn't it?
Most of these laws weren't passed last year, and the issue has been legislatively moot for 50 years, so you're going to have a very hard time convincing me that those laws represent the current will of the people in every state.
> you are wanting to subvert their democratic process, no?
Yes. I believe there are and should be restrictions on what the majority of a state can pass.
I do want to subvert the democratic process in some specific instances. For example, if the majority of a state I didn't live in wanted to legalize slavery, I would say that they do not get that choice and that they may not.
It's not like this is groundbreaking. There are all kinds of federal laws that preempt state laws on various topics.
Pretty sure CA just had the will of its voters thrown out just yesterday relating to their gun laws, so maybe it's not so sacrosanct.
https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/prior-elections/statewide-e...
http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/voter-turnout...
It's not that easy.
But this is not the case and sometimes we regress.
It demonstates that you are willing to force a woman to carry the child of a rapist against her will (so it's not her choice) and then have her give birth without medical assitance if she can't afford hospital stay, potentially resulting in the death of the child and the mother.
it shows what the game is really about - control over women
As for paying for it… no taxes need to be raised. Just divert 1/1000th of the money going to the military.
Except the child's death isn't guaranteed if we fail to implement universal healthcare/free school lunches/insert welfare program here, so it's not really a normal trolley problem. And that's before you get into potential adverse second order effects of such programs.
>Just divert 1/1000th of the money going to the military.
GP mentioned universal healthcare as one of the ways in which to support children after birth, I don't think $800 million is going to be enough to cover it.
I'm also not sure how giving the power to pry into people's reproductive decisions is somehow less state power than administrative power to distribute resources.
[1] That's accepting the argument that a fetus is technically a person, which can also be debated.
sorry, this is not enlightened.
The key questions is, how many of such peope exist.
Life for the sake of life feels like virtue signaling, especially since those who espouse it have no interest in providing social programs to help these mothers and couples raise the kid they were forced to have. That’s pretty barbaric.
Congratulations. You saved a life you almost immediately stop giving a shit about.
Should we not wipe out polio because our ancestors couldn't?
Narrator: He never emailed.
So they could have used condoms, the man could have avoided ejaculating where it could cause pregnancy, or they could also just not have sex or the woman could take pills or an IUD. Unless it was rape, nobody forced them to have a child.
I do agree that there should be programs that help the parents more.
Or what about rape cases which take longer than 9 months to reach a conviction?
And the second issue seems to be an issue of bureaucracy and it's slowness.
Those cases are both valid where I think most people would argue it's not as clear cut but I think they are mostly the exception, not the rule.
Like… your opinion is that corner cases don’t matter in law?
That's not an enlightened or moral direction.
It's all a matter of punishing women for their own desire to be emancipated, it's a punishment for those women who have sinned by thinking they could act like a man and have sex whenever they wanted. If they truly cared about the unborn, they would
1. care about the already born, first, and 2. push for the widespread availability of contraception.
Given that contraception is bad for them, too, it's clear this is not an ethical question, but a moral one: sex outside of marriage, or for pleasure really, should not be allowed, and it must always carry consequences, no matter if it vastly more impacts women than it does men. You know, a man can always run from their responsibilities, while a woman cannot run away from her womb.
As has been pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, we don't vote for Supreme Court justices. There's no leverage to impose electoral or party pressure on a justice who has already been appointed, unless it is by impeachment. Your assessment of their motivations doesn't hold up.
It stands to reason that on average, if you elect conservative presidents and senators, you will get conservative justices, and vice-versa.
You seem to assert that there are wolves hiding in sheeps’ clothing, waiting until they are confirmed to show their true colors to save the country. I counter that reality is more boring than that, and that these people can be taken at face value by virtue of what they’ve said and done for decades.
Furthermore, I think yours is an apologist/denialist stance people use so they can get someone in the courts they truly approve of, while hiding behind the “hope” that they won’t be as bad as everyone else knows they will.
> You seem to assert that there are wolves hiding in sheeps’ clothing, waiting until they are confirmed to show their true colors to save the country
Against this characterization I would oppose John Roberts, who was appointed by a Republican president, but has been reluctant to create any non-trivial precedent on topics that figure in the Republican platform. There's a lot of anger among Republican voters over that, but what can they do? They can't vote him out, he is not beholden to the Republican party, and he's done nothing impeachable.
I understand how this can be difficult to perceive from outside, especially if you happen to be in a bubble that perceives Republicans as uniformly deplorable. But I assure you that Roberts is viewed that way. (I view them from another direction entirely.)
As far as my stance being apologist or denialist, you have no idea what I think or want.
zzleeper: “Are you naive…? Republicans have lists of candidates for justices…they have deemed…anti roe-vs-wade”
you: “If I'm naive, please explain”
This is where you lost the point, and where I explained your naïveté, an explanation you ignored in your response to me.
Your last two paragraphs consist of speculative ad hominem (judging by your profile, we have similar life circumstances, and I have many conservatives in my “bubble” ie family members) followed by a hypocritical self defense. We don’t know anything about each other outside of what we’ve said here. I’m simply calling it like I see it:
you: “Why [wouldn’t Thomas change his mind once he is appointed], if he's now free to act as he pleases?…what's to stop him doing as he thinks is right…?”
The obvious answer is that he was appointed precisely because it was expected he would act the way he has, because what he believes is right is fully aligned with who appointed him, as are the three most recent appointees. You want to point out exceptions like Roberts, but those merely prove the rule from my original explanation.
This is just straw manning the other side's position to the extreme.
> If they truly cared about the unborn, they would
Neither of those are logical implications of being against late-stage abortion, and you don't get to tell others what they should care about.
These are the same people who actively work against giving children school lunches, who protect racist gerrymandering, who want to defund planned parenthood, and so on.
If, in the same breath, we were talking about significantly revolutionizing support for children/families in poverty, then this would be a different discussion. Sadly, look at the polls, this is majority boomers who no longer have functioning ovaries & men whose egos demand control over women.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/393104/pro-choice-identificatio...
On the hand, I think the right has done more than they usually get credit for. Median real wages rose significantly under Trump. [1] Nixon created the EPA. [2] At an individual level, conservatives donate significantly more to charities, and give blood more often. [3]
[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Environmental_...
[3]: https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/conservatives-are-more-...
I don't have any stats on that, but it's contrary to my personal experience. When I was a student, there was this Pentecostal group which used to give free food to everyone every Thursday. It was quite unconditional, not even means tested.
I'm not sure if I follow. That seems to me like having more empathy with irresponsible people, possibly at the cost of innocent fetuses.
On another thought, you think the best thing to do is give people you judge as irresponsible a child? Also, doesn’t original sin mean the fetus not innocent? Is innocence really the important measure? Because lots of things are innocent we don’t care about.
I don't have any particular problems with contraception. Some right-wingers do, they should speak for themselves. (I'm also not against early-stage abortions)
> On another thought, you think the best thing to do is give people you judge as irresponsible a child?
It's not ideal, it's just better than normalizing taking innocent lives. Also, if someone really thinks they can't be a good parent, putting up the baby for adoption is always an option.
> Also, doesn’t original sin mean the fetus not innocent?(which of course doesn't really apply since it's not a person)
I'm not religious, so I don't really think about the issue in terms of sins in the religious sense.
You may disagree with the idea it is murder, but if it is in fact murder than it is completely consistent to support laws against it.
And people who are opposed to physics believe Earth is flat. Both views are the same in terms of rationality.
You may disagree with some of the premises but they follow one another and have decent reasons to believe them. That is hardly irrational.
Something to keep in mind. If you want to actually convince somebody in the future, saying their views are as irrational as believing the Earth is flat isn't the best way.
[1] https://www.princeton.edu/~prolife/articles/embryoquotes2.ht...
[2] https://www.princeton.edu/~prolife/articles/embryoquotes.htm...
Forced birthers are crazy, full stop. A fertilized egg is not a human any more than a sperm is a human.
And here you're making the same mistake again: you're assuming that if someone disagrees with your ideas about biology it means they don't understand it. In reality the reverse is true - pro-life myths might make sense to a high schooler, but not to someone who actually understands the topic.
(Also, you're conflating 'being homo sapiens' with 'being a person'; you've already tried this method of derailing the discussion two days before.)
Of course it would. Should you be able to murder your kids in your house because "your house, your choice"?
Does it mean a parent can be forced to donate an organ for transplant for their child?
>Should you be able to murder your kids in your house
Completely different situation; we are talking about bodily autonomy, not “housing autonomy”.
I am not who you were responding to, but since we were talking previously I will remind you what I said before. You are not obligated to provide what people need above the basic necessities. Organ donations go beyond that.
>You may disagree with some of the premises but they follow one another
You can say the exact same thing about antivaxers.
>If you want to actually convince somebody in the future, saying their views are as irrational as believing the Earth is flat isn't the best way.
Honestly, I don't think I can convince a flat-earther or pro-lifer. This kind of brainwashing appears to be unfixable. What can be done is limiting the spread.
As a pro-choice person, I could be convinced against abortion _if_ there was a guarantee that every child would have the full resources of the government to help them achieve a successful life. We all know that isn't going to happen.
So without the appropriate follow-through, this is actually less enlightened and hurting both parents and children more.
Kids brought up with bad parents will be somewhat similarly disadvantaged. Why should potentially bad parents (eg. heavy drug addicts) not be banned from having kids? Both of them would be "forcing children onto parents who are in bad positions to raise them".
And exactly how does banning an abortion when the pregnancy is not viable for any number of reasons (molar pregnancy, ectopic pregnancy, anencephaly) help anyone? Why are we forcing women to carry dead fetus's around in their bodies?
Because that's what a total ban on abortion does. It also makes IVF illegal if "life begins at conception".
The notion that the only abortions happening are happy couples who find out they're pregnant, tell their friends and family, plan parties, and then in some sinister plot months later wake up and casually decide "you know what, let's just kill it" is absurd.
Not all life is equal, and not all human life is equal. If you were driving down the street and two buildings were on fire, a IVF clinic with viable implanted eggs, and a preschool full of living children, you would 100% of the time try and rescue the preschoolers if you only had time for one. The idea that all human life down to a recently implanted egg has the same value as an 11 year old girl who's been raped and wants an abortion is an untenable position.
Controversial opinion, prisons aren't a deterrent, corporal punishment would leave a more lasting impression and instill fear into would be offenders. It would also be more cost effective and efficient.
Or is it common in your country, but the justice system nails the rapist every time?
If prolife movement actually cared about protecting life, they would not support policies that leave children to die of terrible diseases if their family can't afford healthcare.
But there are some stages in the life of a human fetus that is less sentient than a monkey, a horse, a dog, a fly, an ant, etc.
Do you think abortion should be illegal at all stages?
And, do you think that abortion should be illegal even if the woman faces life threatning risks?
The ruling today says that the federal government does not have that power, absent legislation. But by the same token, it also could not BAN abortion absent federal legislation.
Others have commented on the weakness of the original "penumbral reasoning" of Roe v. Wade decision establishing the government's ability to do this, and that this criticism is recognized by judges commonly perceived to be on either side of the political spectrum.
A lens with which to view this decision through is the correction of technical debt, and it's really not that remarkable from a legal perspective.
It's very remarkable from a social perspective, considering many of us have grown up in a Roe v. Wade world.
But this returns the burden to states. In my state, today's ruling changes nothing, as abortion is protected by our state constitution. In other states, there's some political work to do assuming the citizenry in those states agrees that things should be different.
If there's actually a consensus opinion on abortion in the US across enough states, federal legislation could be created some day. By design, federal legislation is a slow process - it's designed to be inefficient. One of the biggest liberal criticisms of Roe v. Wade is that it stopped the process cold, and we've lost decades of time to have that conversation about legislation in trade for a decision on very weak legal footing, which many have argued was long overdue for correction.
From my vantage point, the questions you raise are immaterial to the legal issue decided in the SCOTUS. This decision was one about the structural relationship between the states and the federal government. The questions you raise are relevant to the state politics that need to take place going forward, for sure. But it comes back to this question - if the majority of people in a state believe that abortion past some point in time (1w, 14w, 24w, pick one) constitutes murder, should they not be allowed to have their state law reflect that? We believe other nations have that power for diverse views on the matter - France, I believe, doesn't allow abortions after 14w (it was merely 10 up until 2000). When evaluating law in the US, a key premise is the idea that the US is a collection of states that outsources certain functions to a central government, not a singular government with separate census areas.
And this decision was not about any "state rights" bullshit. The court previously found an unenumerated right to an abortion, and now they completely reversed themselves. Women do not have complete body autonomy and must support another life no matter the impact on their own.
Seems to me that the arc of the moral universe is actually more of a spaghetti. While some things improve, others regress.
Dr. Martin Luther King
That's the central fallacy of Whig historiography [1]. It is in part facilitated by the fact that recent history is often written by the victors.
MLK repeated the same fallacy: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Is that the same arc that included two world wars?
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history
Look at Iraq, the cradle of civilization, the seat of Babylon. And Egypt. And even Greece to an extent. Former glories of the world but they aren't the most glorious places in the world now.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...
Kind of a provocative study and you could make a similar case for leaded gasoline and other factors but nevertheless interesting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html