No it wasn’t. You had a constitutional right to privacy, not to abortion. It was obviously tenuous reasoning at the time, and its shaky footing hasn’t exactly been a secret ever since. Roe should have been codified into law if we really wanted to keep it around long term.
That was my point. Roe didn't establish a right to privacy but it was justified with a right to privacy. Roe was overturned because the SCOTUS now argues that there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy so Roe was invalid.
That's not what the ruling was though. And it makes sense. "If" a fetus is a viable human at some point, then claiming privacy when ending its life wouldn't pass muster any more than privately killing someone in your basement would. It's not a matter of privacy. Privacy has nothing to do with it, which was their point.
Roe was always on shaky ground and it's surprising it took 50 years to get overturned. Meanwhile, these issues can and should be solved through legislation, not cutesy legal arguments in front of judges.
Roe v Wade was based on a purported right to privacy (I don’t understand the legal contortions that link abortions to privacy).
When they overturned Roe v Wade last year they simultaneously overturned the previous rulings that established a (limited by international standards) right to privacy in the US.
This is simply a matter of law. The justification for Roe Vs Wade doesn't hold water, it never did, it asserts a right to privacy that apparently only applies in the specific case of abortion and not in warrantless surveillance or any other matter. It was a legal fiction.
This “privacy” was clearly a made up argument. It doesn’t apply in any other case (e.g. “selling your kidney” is also privacy without interference of the state yet nevertheless illegal).
You can easily overturn Roe while leaving all other rights in place.
"This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or ... in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether to terminate her pregnancy."
Except there isn't a explicit right to privacy either in the constitution or the bill of rights. Which is why RBG always argued that Roe v. Wade was poorly decided.
The entire underpinnings of Roe v Wade rely on the concept that we as individuals have a constitutional right to privacy. That was the logic used for the ruling: That the government cannot intrude on abortion because it violates a woman's rights to privacy.
Now with the supreme court set to argue that there is no constitutional right to abortion this also follows that there is no constitutional right to privacy either. The argument is essentially that the constitution does not directly spell out a right to either, therefore the previous rulings are null and void. Anyone that cares even an iota about privacy should be very concerned about this.
I'm fully pro-abortion but I have to admit Roe's legal argument was a big stretch at best. Even RBG admitted so. I wish they'd have left it alone but moreso I wish congress made any attempt in 50 years to codify it into law.
No... it's really not. She said the way it was argued (privacy) was not a solid legal ground, which is correct. Roe v Wade the case was not about abortion as a whole (which is still legal in the United States as a whole, since there's no law banning it). Roe v Wade was a case that said the Constitution has a right to privacy that includes abortion, which it does not.
Maybe in the future, someone will attempt to argue an equal rights case. Maybe not.
Either way, that case will not be Roe v Wade. Supporting abortion is not the same as supporting Roe v Wade. Two separate things when it comes to law.
Hmm, I don't think that's accurate. Roe v Wade did say that Texas's statutes against abortion violated the fundamental right to privacy found in the 14th amendment. If Roe v Wade had simply said "It's a federal issue, it's up to Congress to pass an amendment if they want it changed", then I think you'd be right.
But Roe v Wade went further than that, with all the talk about pregnancy trimester nonsense. I buy into the premise of a right to privacy being derived from the 14th Amendment, but there's certainly nothing about trimesters in that amendment; it reeks of the court trying legislate. Either this right to privacy exists or it doesn't, it shouldn't be conditional on trimesters. I think this is where they fucked up.
Anyway, now Congress has to do what they should have done 50 years ago and sort this mess out the proper way.
Roe v. Wade was a pure exercise in legislating from the bench, and even many of its supporters will admit that.
O'Connor got it right in Casey when she distanced the right to abortion from the right to privacy: "That is because the liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition and so unique to the law."
From Roe:
"The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however, going back perhaps as far as Union Pacific R. Co. v. Botsford, 141 U.S. 250, 251 (1891), the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution. In varying contexts, the Court or individual Justices have, indeed, found at least the roots of that right in the First Amendment, Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557, 564 (1969); in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 8-9 (1968), Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 350 (1967), Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616 (1886), see Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 478 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting); in the penumbras of the Bill of Rights."
That handwave-y language ("does not explicitly mention", "a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy", "at least the roots") doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the existence of a broad, fundamental right to privacy in the Constitution. Also, it uses "privacy" in a somewhat different sense than the surveillance debate. In Roe, it's used more like "liberty."
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