However, I am unimpressed
:rolleyes:
I bet you could also find evidence of thousands of women who were pleased as punch with their abortions. In fact, I bet you could also find women who had children who wished that had aborted when they had the chance. If you let people make their own decisions, of course some of them will regret it later. Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have had the choice in the first place.
One of my co-workers forwarded me an e-mail about this; Fox News is running an online poll about it today. Go to foxnews.com, scroll down and on the right is the poll.
Anyone know the legal basis on which she is hoping to have the decision overturned? None of the news articles I’ve read so far have discussed it in any detail. Surely it wasn’t a secret at the time of the original decisions that some women later regret having had an abortion, so what new information could there possibly be? I mean, isn’t decades later a little late to be having second thoughts, at least for purposes of overturning legal precedent? Any lawyers out there care to comment on whether she has a leg to stand on?
From what I heard on tv by a lawyer, she doesn’t have a case.
You can’t win a case, then change your mind.
its still binding.
I regret eating too much ice cream last night. The Supreme Court should ban it.
Regretting doing something has nothing to do with its legality.
Link to stupid, frivolous, court-clogging, publicity-whoring motion itself.
Ms. McCorvey is requesting the court to grant her “relief from a final judgment,” authorized by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b). But the judgment of Roe v. Wade was that the state of Texas could not prevent Ms. McCorvey from obtaining an abortion. That judgment does not declare a damn thing about the constitutionality of abortion, which is a question of law that may not be changed by a bullshit collateral attack on a judgment.
I hope that the court sanctions Ms. McCorvey and her attorneys.
Jumping ship to the “other side” isn’t uncommon. I’ve read that the woman who founded MADD now works for Anheiser-Busch, lobbying for lower drunk-driving penalties.
The “spokesperson” for any cause is always an attractive person to convert to the “other side.” It’s like getting John Glenn to speak out against funding NASA. People seem to find special significance in the words of someone who has “seen the light.”
Isn’t there some sort of rule against this? The case happened 30 years ago. It’s kind of moot by now. The judgement would in no way affect her personally at this point. She’s probably reached menopause by now anyways.
No fan of abortion I, being firmly in the pro-life camp.
But this action is a waste of time, it’s frivolous, and is clearly being done solely for the publicity value. It’s a poor thing to do.
I am firmly pro-choice, aothough I think Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided. However, I fully agree with Bricker about this action being legally frivolous. However, judged as as a publicity stunt, it’s not bad.
Hell, the judgment never affected Jane Roe. If she wants to not have an abortion, she can not have an abortion. What the judgment did was prevent the state of Texas from prohibiting her from having an abortion. The gist of her complaint now seems to be that the judgment prevents the state from enforcing its anti-abortion laws. But that’s not Norma McCorvey’s problem; that’s the state’s problem.
I don’t understand her theory. I would think Mr. Wade would be bringing the motion. How can the prevailing party be “relieved” of a judgment?
Now, if Texas brought the motion, and based it on what is alleged to have been fraud by Mesdames Roe and Doe (i.e., misleading the court about the pregnancy being a result of rape, and about Doe’s health), could R. 60(b)(6) be that elastic? It’s less frivolous to think so – though given that Roe admitted her/Weddington’s lie as early as ca. 1987, I don’t know that even a claim by Wade would meet Rule 60’s requirement of bringing the motion “within a reasonable time.”
I don’t know that conservatives/federalists would welcome victory on Roe’s instant motion (putting aside the standing/time issues). It seems full of the type of legally irrelevant, mushy sociological anecdotes that animated so many of the anti-federalist Warren Court rulings the conservatives deplored so much. The “women regret abortion”/“fetuses are viable much earlier than we thought” arguments have a place, but it is in the political debate, not in trying to go tit for tat to somehow retroactively neutralize the judicial effect of Norma Roe’s own irrelevant (and fabricated) sob stories from back in the day.
Besides, considering she didn’t even have an abortion in the first place…
Well . . . careful with that one.
On that same rationale, the S.C. could arguably have declined jurisdiction for want of a live case or controversy between the plaintiff and defendant at the time the case was before the Court for decision.
I’m surprised more people don’t feel this way. A law student reading through that decision as I have would find it to be confusing and arbitrary. Not at all the first time I’ve read a decision that used very weak reasoning to reach the desired decision, I read plenty of them as a law student.
It’s a very poorly written and poorly reasoned decision, and I think that should be recognizable even to advocates of legal abortion. Surely somebody in the past 30 years has come up with a better way to construct a federal issue out of state abortion laws than Blackmun did.
Not the first time a monumental case has ended up totally irrelevant to the plaintiff. Dred Scott v. Sanford pushed the nation closer to war, while Dred Scott himself was eventually freed by the abolitionist who became his owner’s second husband, and was already living more or less as a free man during the trial. It was the abolitionists’ black citizenship test case, in much the way that “Jane Roe” was the abortion advocates’ test case. The irrelevance to the particular plaintiff in Scott didn’t stop the court from reaching a outrageous sweeping decision in that case that blacks couldn’t be citizens under the Constitution (a decision that went waaaay beyond the issue in the case, and had the War not occured probably would have been later treated as irrelevant dicta by a future court once slavery had met it’s inevitable economic death.)
Whether or not it makes any difference to the plaintiff, these cases that get hijacked by activists have the potential to shake the legal foundations of the nation, for better or worse.
This rationale was in fact employed by a Justice. This was the entire basis of Rehnquist’s dissent in Roe. He wished to entirely avoid the Constitutional issue. Traditionally, all federal courts are reluctant to invoke the Constitution or make a ruling of Constitutional interpretation if they can avoid such a ruling by using some other line of reasoning, coming to a more narrow holding.
I’ve read cases where courts absolutely bend over backwards to find a way to rule on the case that doesn’t address the Constitutional argument. If a lawyer raises multiple challenges to a lower court decision, and one of them is Constitutional whereas the others aren’t, you can bet that 9 times out of 10 the court will basically ignore the Constitutional challenge and find a way to rule appropriately based solely on the other arguments.
So this was the thrust of Rehnquist’s argument, that the case shouldn’t even be before the court. It was Byron White that made the ideological dissent and addressed the Constitutional issues.
Well, my point was, how does she know that she would feel regret? I mean, I seem to recall reading (sorry, no cite) that she still wishes she could have had an abortion.
Women’s intuition. Chicks just know these things.
:: ducking and running ::
Well she was just on Hannity&Colmes (with her lawyer) a half hour ago, so I think I can relay what she said in a nutshell.
She said that at the time of the case, she had indeed desired an abortion. She claims that she would have regretted that decision later after finding out more about the experiences of women who had abortions. Whether by “later” she means upon hearing anecdotal stories of women who regret their own abortions for the rest of their lives, or if by “later” she means her 1995 conversion to Roman Catholicism, I’m not sure. But it’s those anecdotal testimonies of regretful women that her lawyer was focusing on, so I suspect that’s what she’s pointing to as evidence that she herself would have regretted having an abortion.
Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification.
I’m firmly pro-choice, but I find it fascinating and slightly disturbing to try to put myself into the mind of the child whose development was at the core of Roe v. Wade.
What’s it like to realize that the only reason you exist is because your mother wasn’t allowed to abort her pregnancy?
It doesn’t change my views on the abortion debate, but it does keep me from being too smug about my self-presumed enlightened outlook.