Updated: Roe v. Wade overturned

[Shoney'sPonyBoy 338]

On 3/3/2019 at 8:02 PM, tomcat said:

. It is totally inappropriate for anyone to apply their values and opinions, religious or otherwise, to a situation where they have no interest...

So I'm white.  A white, hetero, cis male, in fact.

I have no interest in social justice or racial equality other than my values and opinions.

I shouldn't apply them to that situation?

[Shoney'sPonyBoy 338]

52 minutes ago, CoffeeTiger said:

 

Do you believe that forced legalization where anyone has the option for an abortion but is never forced to have one is equal to forced criminalization where nobody is allowed to have one regardless of their values or opinions or needs?

That dichotomy only makes sense from the standpoint of the adults in question.

It's nonsensical when considering the unborn contingent.

[Cardin Drake 1,825]

5 hours ago, homersapien said:

I agree with a good deal of your post, but I see nothing wrong with  a judge ruling that a woman's autonomy over her own body should qualify as an unenumerated right. 

In fact, it seems rather obvious to me.

I think you have to separate the legal argument from the moral argument.  You have a compelling moral argument that I respect.  I tend to agree with it, although I think both sides have a compelling moral argument, It's a collision between two fundamental moral principles that can't be resolved.  In that case let the states hash it out and if it's important to you, live in the state that agrees with you. I've always thought it weird that you can have sex with a 16 year old in Alabama and Georgia and you are fine, but if you cross into Florida, you suddenly become a rapist. But that's the tenth amendment in action, and it's quite clear: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.  I know the tenth amendment is all but dead, so I'm not sure why the justices would try to put the genie back in the bottle over this one thing, but here we are. So coffeetiger, if you don't like Oklahoma's law, it's easy. Don't live there.  I agree with you that six weeks is extreme, but everyone in Texas knows Oklahoma sucks anyway.

I still think this is somewhat of a disaster for Republicans. An outright ban on abortion is not popular even in red states. Conservative's kids get pregnant out of wedlock too.  This is going to be easy to demonize, and it's giving the democrats a lot of energy when they had almost none.  That was the main point of my earlier post.

[GoAU 1,600]

I understand the question, but my point wasn’t so much my personal beliefs about the situation as much as the real issue here is where people think the definition of “human life” begins.   I really don’t want to believe there are many people the believe like begins at “X” weeks, but are OK with termination of a life after that.  
 

if you are asking about my opinion, I’m happy to share that I believe life starts at conception, and the killing of an innocent life is wrong.  But I also don’t want laws drawn up based on my opinion of the issue.   For example, partial birth abortion and third trimester abortions should be clear we are talking about the termination of an innocent life - I’m not sure why those are even up for debate.  

[aubiefifty 16,761]

Blackburn warning us of plans of some in GOP to outlaw abortion, birth control | Opinion

Justin Allen Rose

Tue, May 3, 2022, 9:39 AM

In this article:

Marsha Blackburn

United States Senator from Tennessee

When politicians say the quiet part out loud, believe them. This is exactly what happened when U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn spoke in a recent video explaining the questioning she planned for the Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson listens as she is asked a question from Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., front left, during her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, March 23. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

In this video, the Tennessee senator announced that she would like to know Jackson’s views on certain past supreme court decisions that Blackburn finds to be “constitutionally unsound.”

One of the past court cases she named was Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). This specific court case ruled as unconstitutional an 1879 Connecticut law that banned the use of any drug, medical device or any other instrument to block conception. In other words, this law effectively outlawed birth control.

The justices at the time ruled 7-2 in favor of a woman’s constitutional right to obtain birth control. With this ruling, the justices also established that the First, Third, Fourth and Ninth Amendments, when put together, create our constitutional right to privacy. This right to privacy was later used to give women the right to obtain an abortion and to even outlaw a sodomy law in Texas.

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Conservative pundits usually scoff at liberals anytime they claim Republicans will attempt to outlaw birth control if Roe v. Wade is ever overturned. However, Blackburn has basically let everyone in on the plans of the religious-conservative sect of the Republican Party.

Hear more Tennessee voices: Get the weekly opinion newsletter for insightful and thought-provoking columns.

It is no secret that these individuals want Roe to be overturned. They are clear as day about this. However, with Blackburn’s recent comments, it is clear that these politicians also want to outlaw any sort of birth control. If the conservative majority on the court stays or — worse — expands in the years to come, then it should not be a surprise to anyone what will happen next.

Justin Rose

We have already seen what Republican majorities in state legislatures around the country are willing to do to make sure women bend to their religious beliefs. Texas has already passed a very restrictive anti-choice bill that essentially outlaws abortion, and Tennessee has used this Texas bill to produce one of its own that is being debated.

Not only does this Tennessee bill basically keep anyone from obtaining an abortion, it also allows individuals to sue a woman for getting an abortion. That means if a woman is raped, conceives a fetus through said act, and then obtains an abortion, the family members of said rapist are allowed to sue that woman.

Once these anti-choice bills make it through the court system, Roe very well could be overturned and all of the negative consequences that would stem from such a decision will come to fruition. We will see back-alley abortions rise, and so will the deaths of women who basically have no other choice but to undergo these risky procedures.

 

I hate to seem like a fearmonger, but when they say the quiet part out loud, believe them.

Justin Allen Rose is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Blackburn warned of GOP push to overturn Roe v. Wade, outlaw birth control

[aubiefifty 16,761]

let me stir the pot here. if you are anti abortion and yet want to ban birth control you do not give a damn about murdered babies. this is one of the many reasons people do not want to get behind the gov and religious leaders because when is enough enough? someone justify how trashing birth control saves babies lives?

"One of the past court cases she named was Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). This specific court case ruled as unconstitutional an 1879 Connecticut law that banned the use of any drug, medical device or any other instrument to block conception. In other words, this law effectively outlawed birth control. "

the above paragraph is nothing more than religious overreach and if you agreee with outlawing birth control you are just as guilty of babies dying as anyone else.

[aubiefifty 16,761]

just to be fair even tho few women come to the political boards.........

[AU9377 4,925]

Pass a law telling men what they can and cannot do with their sperm.  See how long that takes.

Question.... Are fertility doctors actually murderers?  After all, they discard frozen embryos.

[homersapien 11,366]

(emphasis mine)

The Supreme Court might never recover from overturning Roe v. Wade

On Monday, Politico published a draft of a Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling declaring that the Constitution guarantees Americans the right to end their pregnancies. The court later confirmed that the document, written in February, is genuine, but emphasized that it is not the court’s final word. We hope not. If the justices embrace the sweeping document, they will deal a grievous blow to freedom in the United States — and to the legitimacy of the court itself.

Such a leak from the court’s typically tight inner sanctum is itself astonishing. The court works on trust among justices and staff, so that the justices can deliberate frankly. Whether the document leaked from a conservative justice’s chambers, in an effort to lock in the support of others on the right for its far-reaching language, or from a liberal’s, in an effort to mobilize outside pressure against such a ruling, the leak represents a dire breakdown in norms and another dramatic sign of the court’s political drift.

But the draft ruling’s dreadful reasoning and extreme potential consequences are far more concerning than what the leak says about the court’s internal dynamics. Written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the document would declare Roe “egregiously wrong,” obliterate its guarantees of reproductive choice and empower lawmakers to abridge at will this long-held right.

The court’s legitimacy rests on the notion that it follows the law, not the personal or ideological preferences of the justices who happen to serve on it at any given time. Americans rely on the court to exercise care and restraint against making sharp turns that might suddenly declare their everyday choices and activities unprotected or illegal. Over the course of nearly half a century, the court not only issued Roe but upheld its bedrock principles against later challenges. Throughout, the original 1973 decision enjoyed broad and unwavering public support. What brought the court to its current precipice was not a fundamental shift in American values regarding abortion. It was the shameless legislative maneuvering of Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), who jammed three Trump-nominated justices onto the court.

In his draft, Justice Alito points out that the court has overturned many cases in the past, including the atrocious Plessy v. Ferguson, which permitted racial segregation. But the court has never revoked a fundamental constitutional right. Overturning Plessy expanded liberty. Overturning Roe would constrict liberty — and be a repugnant repudiation of the American tradition in which freedom extends to an ever-wider circle of people. By betraying this legacy and siding with the minority of Americans who want to see Roe overturned, the justices would appear to be not fair-minded jurists but reckless ideologues who are dangerously out of touch and hostile to a core American ethic.

Justice Alito complained in his draft that Roe failed to produce a “national settlement of the abortion issue” but only “enflamed debate and deepened division.” That exaggerates the extent to which the obstreperous minority of Americans who oppose Roe reflect the nation as a whole. A Post poll found just last week that Americans support upholding Roe by a 2-to-1 margin. For most people, Roe is a workable standard on a fraught issue; absent a clear understanding about when life begins, and with the moral implications surrounding that question far from settled, the Constitution’s guarantees of personal autonomy demand that pregnant people be able to make the difficult decision about whether to end their pregnancy according to the dictates of their own conscience.

It is Justice Alito’s proposed decision that would further divide the country, starting in nearly every statehouse. Yet the greatest casualties would not be the court as an institution or the nation’s already toxic politics. It would be pregnant individuals suddenly stripped of a right they had been guaranteed for almost half a century. Wealthy people would be able to cross state lines to end their pregnancies. (Although some states are already trying to outlaw that practice, as well.) Poor people would be forced either to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, with all the health consequences and risks that entails, or to seek illegal abortions that could endanger their lives.

Justice Alito’s draft claims that the court’s ruling would not imply that other constitutional rights, such as same-sex marriage or access to contraception, are in jeopardy. But given the brazen abandon with which he would discard abortion rights, his assurances ring hollow. He would inaugurate a terrifying new era in which Americans would lose faith in the court, distrust its members and suspect that what is the law today will not be tomorrow. They would justifiably fear that rights will be swept away because a heedless conservative fringe now controls the judiciary.

“The republic endures and this is the symbol of its faith,” Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes said as the cornerstone was laid for the Supreme Court Building in 1932. The court’s conservative majority appears to be on the verge of abandoning justices’ sacred charge to stand firm for individual rights.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/03/supreme-court-might-never-recover-overturning-roe-v-wade/

 

[homersapien 11,366]

There is a fix:

.....Those despairing about this opinion should remember that the courts do not monopolize abortion politics. Congress could fix the problems such a decision would cause. It can pass a statute guaranteeing the right to abortion, thereby “codifying” Roe. Such a law would be quite hard for the court to overturn. The obvious rejoinder is that such a statute, while supported by a majority in the House and Senate, could not overcome a filibuster.

But there is no reason to maintain a filibuster here. Republicans already went “nuclear” and ended the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees (beginning with Justice Neil M. Gorsuch); if the filibuster can be ended for the enormously significant question of Supreme Court justices and their lifetime appointments, it certainly should be for the far more minor decision of creating a legislative fix to one of their decisions. The effort could even be bipartisan. Certainly senators who voted for nominees believing that they would uphold Roe v. Wade as settled precedent — Susan Collins (R.-Maine) comes to mind — should be doing everything possible to make such legislation the law of the land....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/05/03/abortion-roe-leaked-opinion-consequences-katyal/

 

It will require a simple majority of Democrats in the house and senate.  The fall out from this highly unpopular decision (60-70% of Americans oppose it) makes that more possible. 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 4, 2022 by homersapien

[autigeremt 6,599]

5 hours ago, aubiefifty said:

just to be fair even tho few women come to the political boards.........

it's not that simple.......unless you want it to be. 

[autigeremt 6,599]

When the morality of life is subject to human decision............what a freaking world! People on both sides need to step back and breath.

 

Abortion has its place....but it shouldn't be used in the third trimester unless there's a healthcare component. Rape and incest...YOU BET! WE shouldn't be a nation of abortions.......but we also shouldn't act like it's the end of the world. 

 

 

[aubiefifty 16,761]

2 minutes ago, autigeremt said:

it's not that simple.......unless you want it to be. 

i am just trying to further the discussion. i am posting a brand new article from rolling stone as well be let me say i post things here sometimes that are not always my personal views but i am interested in listening to what both sides have to say.

[aubiefifty 16,761]

Roe v. Wade Is Almost Dead. How Did We Get Here?

Jay Michaelson

15-19 minutes

May 4, 2022 12:35AM ET

Roe v. Wade Is on Life Support. How The **** Did We Get Here?

The short answer is that Republicans played dirty and won and Democrats played pure and lost. The full story, however, is longer, stranger, and even uglier

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

To anyone with a normal, passing familiarity with the Supreme Court, the news that a majority of justices are poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that held that a woman’s right to get an abortion was protected by the constitution, probably came as a shock. How the **** could this happen? How did we get to the point, in 2022, where the government control women’s bodies and force women to give birth?

Notably, those of us with an unhealthy obsession with the Court — I’ve covered it for ten years – were not surprised at all. We’ve seen it coming for a long, long time. So, in brief, here’s how we got here.

Let’s start at the beginning. Abortion is as old as sex — especially non-consensual sex. But it was not usually something governments cared about. In the United States, early-term abortion was legal and unregulated until the 1870s. And it was banned, in some places, because of Victorian-era concerns about hygiene and safety (and sexist biases against midwives) from the emerging medical establishment.

After nearly a century of horrifying back-alley abortions (yes, with coat hangers, but also knitting needles, amateur surgery, poisonous chemicals, and worse), abortion began to be legalized in some states in the 1960s, under pressure from the nascent women’s rights movement and by liberal Christian and Jewish denominations who understood that protecting vulnerable women was a profound moral issue. Gradually, abortion came to be seen as part of every woman’s right to her own bodily autonomy, and in 1973, Roe v. Wade was decided.

Now, as Justice Alito complained ad nauseam in his draft opinion, the word “abortion” is not mentioned in the constitution. But for most of the twentieth century, such literalism was less important than understanding the modern-day implications of broad terms like “liberty,” and rights “reserved by the people.” The writers of the constitution chose not to use specific examples of the rights they protected — that task fell to judges, who, over the decades, developed the idea that there was a fundamental right to personal privacy, especially in the core human activities of marriage and family, that the government could not abridge without a compelling state interest. Abortion was included in that.

At first, Roe v. Wade was not nearly as important as it would later become. Catholics opposed it, but at the time it was decided, most Protestants said that abortions should be legal and evangelical preachers taught that life began at birth.  The Southern Baptist Convention — now a pillar of the conservative “Christian right” — specifically endorsed that view.

What happened? Evangelicals began to get into politics … because of desegregation. When public schools were desegregated in the 1950s, white Evangelicals and Catholics left in droves, sending their kids to so-called “segregation academies,” religious schools that only admitted white people. (Jerry Falwell ran one.) At the same time as Roe was being argued, those academies were found to be illegal, even though white Christians protested that their religious beliefs compelled them to keep the races separated.

Conservative Evangelicals and Catholics had tended to avoid the mess of politics, and rarely agreed with one another, but with courts forcing white Christians to go to school with Black kids, that all changed, and in the late 1970s, the Christian right was born. Yet there was a problem: preserving segregation was no longer an effective unifying issue. And so, Paul Weyrich, Falwell, and other founders of the Christian right — in a history meticulously documented by Randall Balmer — seized on abortion instead.

Abortion was perfect. Support for abortion overlapped with support for desegregation, women’s rights, gay rights, and the sexual revolution. If you fought one, you could fight the others too. Plus abortion was an emotional issue that was easily used to whip up anger and indignation, as well as to drive people to the polls (and to donate money).

The gambit worked. The Christian right got Ronald Reagan elected in 1980, and since then, opposition to abortion has been a defining issue of the Republican Party. And for the last 45 years, the Christian right has been methodically, meticulously planning for this very moment. Christian fundamentalists only supported politicians who were “Pro-Life,” driving moderate Republicans out of the party. They made being “Pro-Life” central to their religious identity. Despite the obvious history, and the total lack of Biblical support, they made “life begins at conception” into dogma.

And they worked to transform the judiciary. Judges and justices began to be vetted for their stances on abortion rights, usually in code. With a newly minted philosophy called “originalism,” legal scholars and judges said that only rights that were “part of our Nation’s history and tradition” were covered by the constitution’s guarantees. No one believed this preposterous idea fifty years ago, but now five Supreme Court justices do.

After a setback in 1992, when conservative justices were expected to overturn Roe but surprisingly didn’t, these efforts gained new steam. After 1992, the goalposts were moved: Republicans would henceforth only appoint confirmed Christian fundamentalists or “originalists” to the Supreme Court. A whole network of dark-money-funded organizations began training, vetting, and promoting arch-conservative judicial nominees. (Check out Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s conspiracy-nutty-but-actually-totally-accurate dissection of that network, complete with charts, from Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearing.)

The fruits of that process are Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.  (Chief Justice Roberts has been a bitter disappointment to the Christian right as he has not towed the line as they expected.) Every one of them was promoted by the same right-wing network — which Justice Thomas’s wife, Ginny, is part of herself. They were all put into place for one purpose: to overturn Roe v. Wade.

And now they seem ready to do so.

Now, you might ask, what about precedent? Doesn’t the Court have to respect Roe, which has been on the books for fifty years?

Well, over the last decade, there’s been a steady drip-drip-drip of opinions from the Court’s right wing, hedging on just how much respect they have to show. Three years ago, Justice Thomas wrote that a precedent can be overturned based on “the quality of the decision’s reasoning; its consistency with related decisions; legal developments since the decision; and reliance on the decision.” Thomas just made that up; that’s not how the Court normally evaluates precedents. But his views are now in Justice Alito’s draft opinion.

Mostly, though, we’ve gotten to this point because the right has played the game a lot smarter, and more intensely, than the Left. Senate Republicans broke with a century of tradition to deny even a hearing to Justice Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland. They broke all the rules, and then broke them again when they nominated Justice Barrett after the 2020 election had already begun. Republicans played dirty and won; Democrats played clean and lost.

Worst of all, Democratic voters just didn’t seem to get it. In 2016, the Supreme Court wasn’t even in the top ten list of issues Democratic voters said they cared about. It was in the top five for Republicans.  And that was reflected in how they voted. In 2016, supposedly righteous Evangelicals who cared about character and values voted for a vulgar, bullying serial adulterer (and accused sexual predator) who didn’t know the Bible from Fifty Shades of Gray. Meanwhile, many Democrats were too pure to hold their noses and vote for Hillary Clinton because she supported the TPP (anyone remember what that even is?), many others simply didn’t vote at all, and many were blocked by Republicans’ use of Jim Crow style voter suppression.

Evangelicals voted tactically, with the Supreme Court in mind, while Democrats voted as if the election was a test of one’s personal virtue. So Trump won.

Numerically, Trump wouldn’t have even come close without the Christian right’s support, and so he delivered on his promises to them, nominating two religious conservatives (Gorsuch and Barrett) and one hardcore political conservative (Kavanaugh) to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, reading the tea leaves, Republicans in states like Texas and Mississippi started passing plainly unconstitutional abortion bans, eager to get a test case before the new Court. The opinion Alito wrote was for one of those cases, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.

That’s how we got here: a campaign born in white supremacy, cemented by the wedding of the Christian right and the Republican Party, and doggedly pursued for nearly half a century. Now embryos are pre-born babies. Now “originalism” is dogma. Now women’s bodies are property of the state.

And make no mistake, the reasoning Justice Alito uses in his Dobbs opinion applies equally to the constitutional right to same-sex marriage, to ‘sodomy’, to contraception, and, yes, to interracial marriage. The constitution doesn’t say those words either, and all of those rights rest on substantive due process: the idea that there is no process that would be “due process” for taking away certain fundamental rights. They are all on the chopping block.

I personally believe that by 2024, my marriage to my husband will be illegal in every red state in the union. Don’t ask me what will happen to my daughter. I really don’t know.

Angry? You should be. So go vote for the lesser of two evils, if that’s how you see the Democrats, while pushing for deeper institutional changes as well (term limits for Supreme Court justices, for example). In places where Republicans are making it harder for people — especially Black and brown people — to vote, help them to vote. Fight the Republicans’ voter suppression machine, and their lies about voter fraud and a stolen election, with old-fashioned, grassroots, boots-on-the-ground activism.

In short, take the Supreme Court as seriously as the Christian right does. Because otherwise, the story of how we got here will end in a place we can’t recognize.

Newswire

[AUDub 11,147]

 

[homersapien 11,366]

14 hours ago, Cardin Drake said:

I think you have to separate the legal argument from the moral argument.  You have a compelling moral argument that I respect.  I tend to agree with it, although I think both sides have a compelling moral argument, It's a collision between two fundamental moral principles that can't be resolved.  In that case let the states hash it out and if it's important to you, live in the state that agrees with you. I've always thought it weird that you can have sex with a 16 year old in Alabama and Georgia and you are fine, but if you cross into Florida, you suddenly become a rapist. But that's the tenth amendment in action, and it's quite clear: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.  I know the tenth amendment is all but dead, so I'm not sure why the justices would try to put the genie back in the bottle over this one thing, but here we are. So coffeetiger, if you don't like Oklahoma's law, it's easy. Don't live there.  I agree with you that six weeks is extreme, but everyone in Texas knows Oklahoma sucks anyway.

I still think this is somewhat of a disaster for Republicans. An outright ban on abortion is not popular even in red states. Conservative's kids get pregnant out of wedlock too.  This is going to be easy to demonize, and it's giving the democrats a lot of energy when they had almost none.  That was the main point of my earlier post.

But the issue here is a state legally enforcing a particular "moral" argument upon another person - the woman - that causes her to make her own personal decisions regarding her body.

And Alito's draft doesn't rest on a moral argument, to the contrary, it makes a legal one:

"The court must overturn Roe, Alito argues, because "[t]he Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision . . . including the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment." 

That argument clearly rejects the principle of  an "unenumerated" constitutional right of a woman to control her own body.  (i.e.: the natural right of privacy that prevents the government from interceding in such matters.) 

This ruling removes that unenumerated right. 

It also opens the door to remove that natural right in all other aspects of government criminalizing or banning activity that has become legally and socially acceptable, such as one's right to marry as a homosexual - or even to legally exist as one.

As a conservative, Alito is not interest in human progress if it conflicts with his own personal moral views. 

He is trying to take us back to the 19th or 20th century, where one's rights are subject to popular politics, no matter how undemocratic they are. 

 

Or as Adam Serwer from The Atlantic put it:

"......The opinion itself reads like a fancy press release from a particularly loyal member of the GOP Senate caucus. Alito’s writing reflects the current tone of right-wing discourse: grandiose and contemptuous, disingenuous and self-contradictory, with the necessary undertone of self-pity as justification. Alito, like the five other conservative justices, was placed on the Court by the conservative legal movement for the purpose of someday handing down this decision. These justices are doing what they were put there to do.

Alito claims to be sweeping away one of the great unjust Supreme Court precedents, such as Dred Scott v. Sanford, which held that Black people had no rights white men were bound to respect, or Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation. But in truth, Alito is employing the logic of Plessy, allowing the states to violate the individual rights of their residents in any way their legislatures deem “reasonable,” as the opinion in Plessy put it. Homer Plessy’s argument was that the segregation law violated his Fourteenth Amendment rights, and that those rights should not be subject to a popularity contest in every state in the union; what Alito describes as a “restrictive regime” of constitutional protection for abortion rights is the kind of safe harbor Plessy himself sought.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/alito-leaked-roe-opinion-abortion-supreme-court-civil-rights/629748/

Edited May 4, 2022 by homersapien

[aubiefifty 16,761]

here is a meme that is popular and brings another perspective......................

[homersapien 11,366]

Here's the full piece of the Atlantic Article I quoted above:

(emphasis mine)

Alito’s Plan to Repeal the 20th Century

If the conservative justice’s draft opinion is adopted by the Court, key advances of the past hundred years could be rolled back.

If you are an American with a young daughter, she will grow up in a world without the right to choose when and where she gives birth, and in which nothing restrains a state from declaring her womb its property, with all the invasive authorities that implies.

That is the significance of the draft Supreme Court opinion leaked to Politico, which shows that the right-wing majority on the Court intends to discard Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, landmark precedents guaranteeing the constitutional right to abortion. The justices can change their minds before judgments are issued, but their opinions are drafted after they’ve taken an initial vote on the cases themselves. The draft likely reflects the direction of the final decision, even if the scope of that decision changes.

The draft, written by Justice Samuel Alito, is sweeping and radical. There is no need to dwell too long on its legal logic; there are no magic words that the authors of prior opinions might have used in their own decisions that could have preserved the right to an abortion in the face of a decisive right-wing majority on the Court. The opinion itself reads like a fancy press release from a particularly loyal member of the GOP Senate caucus. Alito’s writing reflects the current tone of right-wing discourse: grandiose and contemptuous, disingenuous and self-contradictory, with the necessary undertone of self-pity as justification. Alito, like the five other conservative justices, was placed on the Court by the conservative legal movement for the purpose of someday handing down this decision. These justices are doing what they were put there to do.

Alito claims to be sweeping away one of the great unjust Supreme Court precedents, such as Dred Scott v. Sanford, which held that Black people had no rights white men were bound to respect, or Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation. But in truth, Alito is employing the logic of Plessy, allowing the states to violate the individual rights of their residents in any way their legislatures deem “reasonable,” as the opinion in Plessy put it. Homer Plessy’s argument was that the segregation law violated his Fourteenth Amendment rights, and that those rights should not be subject to a popularity contest in every state in the union; what Alito describes as a “restrictive regime” of constitutional protection for abortion rights is the kind of safe harbor Plessy himself sought.

In Plessy, Justice Henry Billings Brown held that Louisiana’s segregation law, as far as the Fourteenth Amendment was concerned, “reduces itself to the question whether the statute of Louisiana is a reasonable regulation, and, with respect to this, there must necessarily be a large discretion on the part of the legislature.” Alito has now applied this same logic to abortion—but not just abortion—arguing that in the future, courts should defer to state legislatures “even when the laws at issue concern matters of great social significance and moral substance.” There’s no doubt that the Louisiana legislature felt the 1890 Separate Car Act was such an issue.

“Plessy is, at its absolute core, a states’-rights case, in which the Court envisioned a notion of federalism so weak, so toothless, so bereft of substance that the federal government had no legitimate role in protecting Black people from states imposing racial segregation upon them,” Aderson Francois, a law professor at Georgetown University, told me. “This draft does the same thing: It envisions a notion of federalism so weak, so toothless, so bereft of substance that the federal government has no legitimate role in protecting women from states imposing forced births upon them.”

The implications of this ruling are therefore tremendous. Notwithstanding the reality that being a woman does not mean being pro-abortion-rights, all over the world the right to decide when and whether to give birth is tied to the political, social, and economic rights of women as individuals. That right is likely to be severely curtailed or to vanish entirely in at least 26 states if this decision takes effect. If the draft becomes the Court’s decision, however, it would have implications for more than just abortion. In the U.S., the rights of many marginalized groups are tied to the legal precedents established in the fight for abortion rights. b

“The majority can believe that it’s only eviscerating a right to abortion in this draft,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told me, “but the means by which it does so would open the door to similar attacks on other unenumerated rights, both directly, by attacking the underpinnings of those doctrines, and indirectly, by setting a precedent for such an attack.”

Aside from rights specifically mentioned in the text of the Constitution, Alito argues, only those rights “deeply rooted in the nation’s history in tradition” deserve its protections. This is as arbitrary as it is lawless. Alito is saying there is no freedom from state coercion that conservatives cannot strip away if conservatives find that freedom personally distasteful. The rights of heterosexual married couples to obtain contraception, or of LGBTQ people to be free from discrimination, are obvious targets. But other rights that Americans now take for granted could easily be excluded by this capricious reasoning.

“In a series of cases beginning in the early 1920s, the Court carved out a protected space for family, marriage, and children that the government is constrained from regulating,” Kimberly Wehle wrote last December. “A rollback of Roe could split this sphere open if the conservative theory that implied rights are constitutionally invalid takes hold, and states begin passing draconian laws that creep into other areas of intimate personal life.”

The right-wing majority’s radical repurposing of the so-called shadow docket to set precedents and nullify constitutional rights rather than simply deal with time-sensitive matters foreshadowed this outcome. In the Court’s religious-freedom decisions related to the coronavirus pandemic, and in its choice last year to allow Texas to nullify the right to an abortion, you can see the outlines of this new legal regime: On the grounds that it constitutes a form of religious discrimination, conservatives will be able to claim an exemption from any generally applicable rule they do not wish to follow, while imposing their own religious and ideological views on those who do not share them. Although the right-wing justices present this rule in the language of constitutionalism, they are simply imposing their ideological and cultural preferences on the rest of the country. Roe itself left those opposed to abortion free not to have one; striking it down allows states to prevent those seeking abortions from obtaining them.

American life will now be guided by the arbitrary vicissitudes of conservative cultural identity, gleaned from Fox News, and by the justices’ inclination to shape their own views to conform to that identity. Aided by voting restrictions and partisan gerrymandering, the conservative movement will argue that its most coercive mandates have popular legitimacy, no matter how much of the country opposes them. If politicians are immune to popular majorities, they have no reason to heed them. But Republicans hardly need such advantages to prevail. One of the baffling mysteries of the past five years is why a movement so effective at the work of democracy is so dedicated to ending it.

An entire industry of commentators has tied its legitimacy to the Court, and they will obfuscate, semanticize, and quibble. These figures have long forestalled any backlash to the Court’s right-wing radicalism by muddying the waters about the significance of an appointment, a decision, a precedent. They have lied to the public, so that it does not realize what is being taken from it. In response to this decision, they will insist that the unprecedented leak is more important than the world the draft threatens to create. It is not.

Similarly, in his opinion, Alito writes that “we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right,” and that “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Give this statement the same weight that should have been given to Alito’s scolding of the press shortly after the Court’s shadow-docket decision on the Texas abortion ban, and his insistence that it had no bearing on Roe and did not nullify the right to an abortion in Texas. Alito’s word means absolutely nothing.

“This is total gaslighting; he knows as well as anyone that these other rights are like Roe, rooted in the right to privacy. If Roe is imperiled because it is unenumerated and not ‘rooted in our history and tradition,’ then these other rights are also subject to challenge,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU, said of Alito’s disclaimer. “Conservative lawyers are going to eat this up like catnip, and of course they are going to challenge these other precedents.”

The conservative movement has been working toward this victory for decades, and it has been made possible not simply by its determination and a few fortunate accidents, but by the haplessness of its opponents. Many in the center of the Democratic Party have been paralyzed by the belief that they might “do popular stuff” and coast to victory without having to get their hands dirty fighting the opposition, while its left-wing critics too often forget that democracy is an ongoing process, not a battle that ceases after casting the right vote once or twice. In both cases, the right has been fortunate in having opponents who argue themselves into complacency.

The overturning of Roe will create a backlash, although not necessarily one that today’s Democrats will profit from, given their aversion to conflict. A movement will eventually emerge to oppose the criminalization of abortion and the despotisms this draft would create, and perhaps some of its leaders are alive today. Whoever they are, they will understand, just as the right-wing activists who worked decades for this moment do, that the freedoms enjoyed by one generation can be stripped away by another.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/alito-leaked-roe-opinion-abortion-supreme-court-civil-rights/629748/

Edited May 4, 2022 by homersapien

[aubiefifty 16,761]

someone on the right please answer me this. if you care about abortion so much why are some on the religious right trying to ban birth control as well? i honestly just do not get it. it sounds like you almost want more babies to be aborted. has anyone realized how many abortions birth control saves every year? some of you right wing christians starting to look a hell of a lot like the taliban. i am absolutely furious they are trying this crap as well. and do not tell me it will never happen tell me why this kind of stupid crap even comes up?

[McLoofus 35,182]

44 minutes ago, AUDub said:

 

Is he the one who has to buy sex from minors? 

[aubiefifty 16,761]

another opinion................

 

‘Abortion restrictions are racist’: Women of color in South face overturning of Roe v. Wade

By The Associated Press

10-12 minutes

---

If you are Black or Hispanic in a conservative state that already limits access to abortions, you are far more likely than a white woman to have one.

And if the U.S. Supreme court allows states to further restrict or even ban abortions, minority women will bear the brunt of it, according to statistics analyzed by The Associated Press.

The potential impact on minority women became all the more clear on Monday with the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion suggesting the court’s conservative majority is poised to overturn the landmark 1973 decision legalizing abortion. The draft decision is not yet final but it sent shockwaves through the country. Overturning the Roe v. Wade decision would give states authority to decide abortion’s legality. Roughly half, largely in the South and Midwest, are likely to quickly ban abortion.

When it comes to the effect on minority women, the numbers are unambiguous. In Mississippi, people of color comprise 44% of the population but 81% of women receiving abortions, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, which tracks health statistics.

In Texas, they’re 59% of the population and 74% of those receiving abortions. The numbers in Alabama are 35% and 69%. In Louisiana, minorities represent 42% of the population, according to the state Health Department, and about 72% of those receiving abortions.

“Abortion restrictions are racist,” said Cathy Torres, an organizing manager with Frontera Fund, a Texas organization that helps women pay for abortions. “They directly impact people of color, Black, brown, Indigenous people ... people who are trying to make ends meet.”

Why the great disparities? Laurie Bertram Roberts, executive director of the Alabama-based Yellowhammer Fund, which provides financial support for women seeking abortion, said women of color in states with restrictive abortion laws often have limited access to health care and a lack of choices for effective birth control. Schools often have ineffective or inadequate sex education.

If abortions are outlawed, those same women — often poor — will likely have the hardest time traveling to distant parts of the country to terminate pregnancies or raising children they might struggle to afford, said Roberts, who is Black and once volunteered at Mississippi’s only abortion clinic.

“We’re talking about folks who are already marginalized,” Roberts said.

Amanda Furdge, who is Black, was one of those women. She was a single, unemployed college student already raising one baby in 2014 when she found out she was pregnant with another. She said she didn’t know how she could afford another child.

She’d had two abortions in Chicago. Getting access to an abortion provider there was no problem, Furdge said. But now she was in Mississippi, having moved home to escape an abusive relationship. Misled by advertising, she first went to a crisis pregnancy center that tried to talk her out of an abortion. By the time she found the abortion clinic, she was too far along to have the procedure.

She’s not surprised by the latest news on the Supreme Court’s likely decision. Most people who aren’t affected don’t consider the stakes.

“People are going to have to vote,” said Furdge, 34, who is happily raising her now 7-year-old son but continues to advocate for women having the right to choose. “People are going to have to put the people in place to make the decisions that align with their values. When they don’t, things like this happen.”

Torres said historically, anti-abortion laws have been crafted in ways that hurt low-income women. She pointed to the Hyde Amendment, a 1980 law that prevents the use of federal funds to pay for abortions except in rare cases.

She also cited the 2021 Texas law that bans abortion after around six weeks of pregnancy. Where she lives, near the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley, women are forced to travel to obtain abortions and must pass in-state border patrol checkpoints where they have to disclose their citizenship status, she said.

Regardless of what legislators say, Torres insisted, the intent is to target women of color, to control their bodies: “They know who these restrictions are going to affect. They know that, but they don’t care.”

But Andy Gipson, a former member of the Mississippi Legislature who is now the state’s agriculture and commerce commissioner, said race had nothing to do with passage of Mississippi’s law against abortion after the 15th week. That law is the one now before the Supreme Court in a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade.

Gipson, a Baptist minister who is white, said he believes all people are created in the image of God and have an “innate value” that starts at conception. Mississippi legislators were trying to protect women and babies by putting limits on abortion, he said.

“I absolutely disagree with the concept that it’s racist or about anything other than saving babies’ lives,” said Gipson, a Republican. “It’s about saving lives of the unborn and the lives and health of the mother, regardless of what color they are.”

To those who say that forcing women to have babies will subject them to hardships, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, a white Republican, said it is “easier for working mothers to balance professional success and family life” than it was 49 years ago when Roe was decided.

Fitch, who is divorced, often points to her own experience of working outside the home while raising three children. But Fitch grew up in an affluent family and has worked in the legal profession — both factors that can give working women the means and the flexibility to get help raising children.

That’s not the case for many minority women in Mississippi or elsewhere. Advocates say in many places where abortion services are being curtailed, there’s little support for women who carry a baby to term.

Mississippi is one of the poorest states, and people in low-wage jobs often don’t receive health insurance. Women can enroll in Medicaid during pregnancy, but that coverage disappears soon after they give birth.

Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Black infants were about twice as likely as white infants to die during the first year of life in Mississippi, according to the March of Dimes.

Across the country, U.S. Census Bureau information analyzed by The Associated Press shows fewer Black and Hispanic women have health insurance, especially in states with tight abortion restrictions. For example, in Texas, Mississippi and Georgia, at least 16% of Black women and 36% of Latinas were uninsured in 2019, some of the highest such rates in the country.

Problems are compounded in states without effective education programs about reproduction. Mississippi law says sex education in public schools must emphasize abstinence to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Discussion of abortion is forbidden, and instructors may not demonstrate how to use condoms or other contraception.

The Mississippi director for Planned Parenthood Southeast, Tyler Harden, is a 26-year-old Black woman who had an abortion about five years ago, an experience that drove her to a career supporting pregnant women and preserving abortion rights.

She said when she was attending public school in rural Mississippi, she didn’t learn about birth control. Instead, a teacher stuck clear tape on students’ arms. The girls were told to put it on another classmate’s arm, and another, and watch how it lost the ability to form a bond.

“They’d tell you, ‘If you have sex, this is who you are now: You’re just like this piece of tape — all used up and washed up and nobody would want it,’” Harden said.

When she became pregnant at 21, she knew she wanted an abortion. Her mother was battling cancer and Harden was in her last semester of college without a job or a place to live after graduation.

She said she was made to feel fear and shame, just as she had during sex ed classes. When she went to the clinic, she said protesters told her she was “‘killing the most precious gift’” from God and that she was “‘killing a Black baby, playing into what white supremacists want.’”

Harden’s experience is not uncommon. The anti-abortion movement has often portrayed the abortion fight in racial terms.

Outside the only abortion clinic operating in Mississippi, protesters hand out brochures that refer to abortion as Black “genocide” and say the late Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and a proponent of eugenics, “desired to eradicate minorities.” The brochures compare Sanger to Adolf Hitler and proclaim: “Black lives did not matter to Margaret Sanger!”

The Mississippi clinic is not affiliated with Planned Parenthood, and Planned Parenthood itself denounces Sanger’s belief in eugenics.

White people are not alone in making this argument. Alveda King, an evangelist who is a niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., is among the Black opponents of abortion who, for years, have been portraying abortion as a way to wipe out people of their race.

Tanya Britton, a former president of Pro-Life Mississippi, often drives three hours from her home in the northern part of the state to pray outside the abortion clinic in Jackson. Britton is Black, and she said it’s a tragedy that the number of Black babies aborted since Roe would equal the population of several large cities. She also said people are too casual about terminating pregnancies.

“You just can’t take the life of someone because this is not convenient — ‘I want to finish my education,’” Britton said. “You wouldn’t kill your 2-year-old because you were in graduate school.”

But state Rep. Zakiya Summers of Jackson, who is Black and a mother, suggested there’s nothing casual about what poor women are doing. Receiving little support in Mississippi — for example, the Legislature killed a proposal to expand postpartum Medicaid coverage in 2021 -- they are sometimes forced to make hard decisions.

“Women are just out here trying to survive, you know?” she said. “And Mississippi doesn’t make it any easier.”

[AU9377 4,925]

2 hours ago, autigeremt said:

When the morality of life is subject to human decision............what a freaking world! People on both sides need to step back and breath.

 

Abortion has its place....but it shouldn't be used in the third trimester unless there's a healthcare component. Rape and incest...YOU BET! WE shouldn't be a nation of abortions.......but we also shouldn't act like it's the end of the world. 

 

 

I think you would find that most agree that third trimester abortions, but for health reasons, should not occur.  I have always been against having an abortion on a personal level, while respecting the right of a woman to choose in general. 

Personally, I don't believe that men should make that choice for women pre viability.  We should all have some right to privacy that includes our own bodies.

Beyond that, we really have to be careful in legislating morality.  Should birth control be banned?  Should pre-marital sex once again be against the law?  In a "free" country, shouldn't government stay out of most of these issues?

Edited May 4, 2022 by AU9377

[DKW 86 7,419]

RVW is a mess. I agree with Alito that the original structure was weak at best. However the reality is that abortions will happen even if illegal. I would suppose that most states will enact laws that leave Abortion upto 12-15 weeks alone. The complete bans are not going to be complete. The rich will get their daughters there’s. 
 

We do need M4A and care for the unborn and born as well. If you don’t want to care for the babies then stfu. 
 

We have so many options here  Different kinds of sex habits, really using birth control, etc. This is not the end of the world. Although, you know the summer is going to be hyper violent. Cities will burn again and the “mostly peaceful” protests will come back. 

Edited May 4, 2022 by DKW 86

[DKW 86 7,419]

Addenda: If you are the father of the child, you should be on the hook for all of the $$$ responsibility.  It does indeed all start with a penis. 

[aubiefifty 16,761]

1 minute ago, DKW 86 said:

Addenda: If you are the father of the child, you should be on the hook for all of the $$$ responsibility.  It does indeed all start with a penis. 

what about the birth control ban some would love to add because it is being discussed. i do not get it.