So I’m a card carrying Fed Soc member. While I’m uncomfortable with legalized second trimester abortion (because at that point the fetus looks like a baby) I don’t think abortion should be banned altogether. But I still think Roe was wrongly decided and properly overturned. I’d estimate that half or more of Fed Soc supports some degree of legalized abortion, but virtually all think Roe was wrongly decided. The idea that it’s all pretext is laughable.
By the way, I think liberals also believe what they say. It’s just that they believe that judges should be cultured elites sitting on a throne telling the rabble how to structure their society.
The fact that liberals peg their views of the Supreme Court’s “legitimacy” on a cluster fuck of an opinion as Roe v. Wade speaks volumes.
Roe is so bad that it has long united libertarian conservatives (who hate it because it makes up a right out of thin air) and social conservatives (who had abortion on the merits).
In addition to that it manages to be wildly out of line with international norms, which:
1) Generally recognize abortion as an issue for the legislature.
2) Typically draw the line for elective abortions at the end of the first trimester, not viability. The abortion laws in Denmark, Germany, Italy, France, and Spain would be unconstitutional under Roe.
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.
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.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I don't think this was a political ruling against abortion. This is small fries and they don't need to politic around with the injunction when they already have the option to overturn federal abortion precedent Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.
Even then, it is hard to argue that if it is legal conservatism or the personal beliefs of the judges, because they both come to the same conclusion. I say this as someone who supports the right to abortion, but the line between the Roe vs Wade and the constitution is tenuous at best, and even worse with reinterpretation under Casey.
When I studied politics as an undergraduate, my insanely liberal professors said: “Roe was a terribly decided decision. It was sloppy legal reasoning, and overall pretty embarrassing. That was rectified by Planned Parenthood v Casey in 1992.”
Almost everyone agrees with you on the emanations of penumbras. Nobody wants that. It was rectified by Casey in 1992.
Roe also claimed abortion was a right because doctors should not worry about the law. Women didn’t have a right to abortion at all. Doctors did. That was fixed by Casey in 1992, and probably a bit early.
Roe hasn’t been the defining law on abortion since 1992 because so many people, pro-choicers especially, regarded it as very flawed.
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
It’s almost as if the liberals didn’t even read this part the current court’s opinion.
“The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives”
How do you figure this is bad for republicans? Most people are squishy on abortion. They support some level of abortion, but mostly in the first trimester or for life of mother or birth defects. All of which are consistent with the Mississippi law that the Supreme Court upheld.
Generally, when the current law is detached from public opinion, the party that seeks to change the law should stand to benefit from it. Of course liberals will use their vast media and cultural power to dupe people into thinking the Supreme Court just banned abortion. But most people will notice that the Supreme Court didn’t do that when blue states inevitably adopt liberal abortion laws as a reaction. And most of the people who will be really worked up about it will live in blue states that will quickly enact abortion until birth. I suspect most other states will pick some 13-15 week middle ground.
I can see Republicans fumbling the ball by trying to ban abortion nationwide. But I can also see a bunch of white liberals reacting to this by shouting “celebrate your abortion” and turning off the mostly Hispanic 3 out of 10 Democrats who identify as “Pro Life,” as well as a bunch of squishy moderates.
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.
Polling on these issues is all over the place, but the number of people who support “overturning roe v wade” is a particularly tricky one to quote considering most people don’t understand constitutional law.
Many of the people in that poll who say they support Roe are also saying they want its ruling to be adjusted - which in practice means overturning Roe and replacing it with new controlling precedent. Arguably, Roe was already overturned once by Planned Parenthood v Casey, which replaced the trimester framework with the undue burden standard and allowed several regulations that had been considered unconstitutional under Roe.
That’s the problem, Roe was an overstepping of the Supreme Court. A law should’ve been passed instead. That is why this Supreme Court ruled the way they did. There was nothing in the Constitution or established law to support Roe.
American here. I think it's important to not characterize judicial review in the Row case as lawmaking. Although lots of anti-abortion advocates criticized Roe as legislating from the bench, the court was actually doing was checking the power of various state governments to take away individual rights. Judicial review has certainly been misused by the court in other cases to legislate, and the concept is anti-democratic to a problematic degree, but it is an important check on governments taking away individual liberties in the US constitutional system, at least in theory.
In Roe, the court didn't write a law saying abortion was legal. It struck down laws stating that it was illegal. That's an important difference.
It's also worth remembering that there was never a realistic chance of a nationwide right to abortion being passed through congress. There are a few reasons for it. Only about 15% of the country is against abortions in all circumstances, but they're a loud minority. Similarly, 20-30% of American are pro-choice under any circumstance. But the majority of Americans support abortion only in certain circumstances, and they tend not to care as much about it. [1]
In cases where a majority doesn't have strong opinions, the US government doesn't really need to pay attention to the will of the voters. Politicians are rarely if ever punished for it. A similar dynamic played out with net neutrality during the last administration. Despite the public, including Republicans, being overwhelmingly for it, it was an issue they hardly cared about, and so the FCC was basically free to do whatever they wanted.
The other reason is that voters who are anti-abortion are not equally distributed amongst the population. Some, mostly smaller states are vehemently anti-abortion. As such, the senate would never muster the 60 votes needed to pass legislation protecting the right. Without Roe, for the last 50 years, we'd basically have been in the situation we're in now: legal in some states, illegal in others, with states fighting each other over whether or not residents can cross state lines to get an abortion.
The eventually overturning of Roe v Wade was long expected even by liberal judges like Ginsburg, not for political reasons but because the tortured reasoning of the original decision was difficult to defend in a consistent system of jurisprudence. The same reasoning could be used to undermine many other legal matters that people generally believe to be correct and good.
Even though I am a pro-choice liberal, I recognize that Roe v Wade was a poor decision and approve its overturning on that basis.
It’s not a “bias” to believe the Constitution doesn’t contain a right to privacy that protects abortion. That’s just being able to read. Pretty much nobody seriously believes in the logic underlying Roe. It’s the Lochner of left-wing jurisprudence. Even Ginsberg criticized the case, and offered a different justification for abortion rights. At this point it’s just stare decisis and ideology sustaining the precedent.
Accusations of “bias” and “preconceived opinion” are absolutely hilarious coming from the left. Republican judges regularly get wobbly and vote for the liberal position (Obergefell, Bostock, Woman’s Health. The liberal judges, however, always vote party line in these cases.)
Roe was decided by the Burger court, which, according to Wikipedia, "is generally considered to be the last liberal court to date". It was heavily based on a Griswold v. Connecticut precedent by the Warren court, generally agreed to be the most liberal Supreme Court in US history. Both of these verdicts were and continue to be widely criticized by conservatives as being based on extremely dubious reasoning. I don't know what made you think that Roe was "decided by conservatives".
There is a lot historical revisionism involved around these issues, with many people making blatantly false claims, either lying, or being themselves mistaken. The result is that people who have not lived through it, or who have not studied the history diligently, are very much misled as to the facts, because the media, which is very good and active at correcting lies and falsehoods spread by conservatives, takes approximately zero efforts to correct falsehoods spread by liberals (often it in fact acts with clear intent of spreading misapprehensions, by selective reporting and careful omission of facts).
I think it was overturned because there’s no actual Constitutional or legal basis for protecting abortion at the federal level. Roe, while absolutely well intentioned was a gross overstep of the court’s authority.
It is Congress’s job to legislate, not the Supreme Court’s. Be upset at Congress for never codifying these protections into law even during several years where the Democrats held Congress and the Presidency giving them ample means to do so.
So why aren't they just regulating abortion at the federal level? If they have the votes for this, they should be able to put something together that allows regulated abortion similar to the level prior to the ruling. They had the votes on gun control recently. I assume some of those supporters are along similar social policies lines for this.
By the way, I think liberals also believe what they say. It’s just that they believe that judges should be cultured elites sitting on a throne telling the rabble how to structure their society.
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