Sure, they can do it in a fashion such as Walloon quoted in #38. In fact, there is a real possibility they might do it that way. Most people who look at it, even if they are pro-choice and would not like to see Roe overturned, tend to admit it amounted to legal contortionism to drag the reasoning for it out of the US Constitution.
Some pro-choicers, yes. Most pro-choicers? I’d need a cite before I’d believe that.
Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School, asked some of the nation’s foremost constitutional law scholars to imagine how they might have written Roe. The results are compiled in What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said: America’s Top Legal Experts Rewrite America’s Most Controversial Decision.
You’re right. I should have said the intellectually honest pro-choicers who have bothered to look into it.
And let me guess… you get to define what “intellectually honest” means, right? :rolleyes:
Why are you busting my balls? I agreed with you.
“Hans Brix! Why you bust my balls!”
You had to have seen Team America, World Police.
Quote:
Has the Supreme Court ever admitted that a past decision was wrong?
Not really. Brown v. Board never said the “separate but equal” conditions of Plessy were wrong. They simply said that in the field of education, separate was inherently unequal. If a situation involves separate but truly equal facilities for a protected class (like separate bathrooms for men and women), I’m sure that SCOTUS would have no problem using Plessy to justify their ruling.
If Roe v Wade is overturned, there will be no security in the decision. Another case and another SCOTUS will make a different decision. I just don’t see the course of history rendering women less powerful. On the other hand, I don’t think that science will make fetuses and embryos less viable.
I wonder if the the laws will become even more restrictive than they were before Roe. Therapeutic abortions are those recommended by the physician. Will they still be legal?
If Roe v. Wade is overturned, state abortion laws would once again pertain.
The defintion of “therapeutic abortion” varies widely. A Google search on define: therapeutic abortion gets these definitions:
• A pregnancy ending in an induced abortion using an operative procedure to electively terminate the pregnancy.
www.ivf.org/glossary.html
• This is when a woman chooses to terminate the pregnancy. Teratogen - A teratogen is any environmental agent, be it a drug, chemical, infection or pollutant which harms a developing embryo or fetus.
health.ucsd.edu/teratogen/Glossary.asp
• An intentional termination of pregnancy for the purpose of preserving the life of the mother.
www.infertilitycentral.com/fertility/infertility-glossary.html
• a termination (due to severe abnormalities or when the mother’s health is at risk) of a pregnancy not intended to result in a live birth.
www.laborcompanions.com/definitions.htm
• a legally induced abortion for medical reasons (as when the mother’s life is threatened)
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Walloon, you keep coming on like there’s some sort of middle ground here – like there’s a legally objectively verifiably correct position on RvW (and the correct position is anti-choice), and that abortion isn’t the most divisive issue ever to come before the Court since the civil rights era. (And we all know what a party THAT was back in the 50s and 60s.)
The reality is that Roberts and Alito were both appoitned by a conservative President very much to appease the desire of his religious conservative base to get anti-abortion jurists on the Court. That’s why they’re there. All this crap about “not a judicial activist” and “stare decis” is just a bunch of bullshit ginned up by the right wing to make the Court-stacking more palatable to the gullible.
You’re right that “prejudices” isn’t really the right term here. Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas probably come by their anti-abortion opinions through their religious faith honestly. But let’s not pretend that the basis on wich they make their decisions is just a matter of legal precedent.
As Michael Corleone says in the Godfather Part II: “Don’t insult my intelligence.”
You don’t seem to seperate your politics from how you view judicial rulings. But that doesnt mean other people are the same.
If those guys vote to overturn Roe, it won’t be because they’re “anti-abortion”, it’ll be because they see abortion as a matter for the states to decide. You’d be right if they cited a “right to life” of the fetus in their ruling and thus banned abortion outright, but I don’t see that happening. What would most likely happen is they would fail to uphold the idea that the right to privacy implied a right to an abortion. That’s an entirely differnet legal argument, and need not depend on whether one is pro- or anti-abortion.
I disagree with the conclusory nature of your statement, John.
I like the way you ignore the substance of my argument and then try a fast bait and switch, but it won’t work. As I’ve already state elsewhere, the conservative Supremes (and the moderates, too, to be fair) know their way around the law. I’m sure the legal basis on which they overturn or otherwise invalidate Roe v Wade will be consistent with whatever existing law they can come up with. But really, John, it’s asking an awful lot of me and everyone else to the left of Dobson to just ignore the politics of the last decade or two and mindlessly accept the decisions of the Supremes are purely judicial in nature, when there’s been SO much political jockeying to ensure that the right OUTCOME occurs.
-
I don’t use propaganda terms like your “anti-choice” (among other reasons because is not the guiding motive of those opposed to abortion),
-
I have not stated that there is a “correct” position is on Roe v. Wade. That is your word, not mine.
-
I do think it very hypocritical that those in the Senate (e.g., Kennedy) and outside it (e.g., National Organization for Women) whose goal is to assure that the Supreme Court is appointed with those who will not overturn Roe v. Wade, cry “court packing” and “appeasing electoral base” about the opposition’s identical strategies against it.
-
I resent the idea that those jurists who affirm Roe v. Wade do so from dispassionate reasoning, while those who oppose it are religious bigots.
Can you elaborate? Ruling against the right to privacy just sends it back to the states. Ruling on a right to life kills abortion regardless of what the states want. No? Do you disagree with that distinction or do you disagree with how *Roe *would be overturned if the 4 justices cited above were to rule against it.
I disagree with your blithe assertion that any vote to overturn Roe will be motivated by federalism concerns rather than personal convictions regarding the morality of abortion. I think the two are, to a large degree, inextricably intertwined – and to the extent they aren’t, you can’t possibly know what’s going through the minds of the Justices in making their ruling.
There are plenty of constitutional scholars who, while supporting the idea of the availability of abortion as a matter of public policy, believe that the Roe v. Wade decision was poorly reasoned from a constitutional standpoint. I refer you again to the anthology What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said: America’s Top Legal Experts Rewrite America’s Most Controversial Decision.
That doesn’t contradict anything I said, Walloon. I agree that Roe was poorly reasoned, and I’m sure there are people out there who are uncomfortable with it on precisely those grounds. I’m just taking issue with John’s flat statement that a ruling overturning Roe on right-to-privacy grounds would not be motivated by anti-abortion feelings.
Well, I think my post is less blithe when taken as a whole, rather than focusing on that one sentence. But, in the interest of eliminating blitheness, let me rephrase…
If the 4 justices cited by **EC **were to overturn Roe because they didn’t accept the “right to privacy -> a right to abortion” argument, one couldn’t conclude that they did so based on their political opposition to abortion (ie, what they personally think public policy should be concerning abortion). Frankly, I don’t think they would do that (or at least not all of them would), but that is just my opinion. A better argument could be made that their anti-abortion political beliefs were influencing their judicial pronouncements if they overturned *Roe *by finding that the constiution protected the right to life of the fetus. The first ruling simply returns abortion to the states (not an unreasonable position to take) while the second ruling would find that the constitution forbids abortion (which is quite a stretch).