This is an excellent example of why the slope sometimes is slippery.
I do think there was a difference between Griswold and Roe. The former was not dishonest, although I believe it was unwise, for the reasons mentioned above. It was most likely a good-faith effort which had the benefit of returning the “right” – the desired, that is – result. It’s harder to look critically at the process when it’s putting you precisely where you wish to be.
Nonetheless, a hard decision at some point would be preferable to the successive cases that lead us further and further down the slippery slope. Nor is it substantive due process alone that suffers from this malady. Look at the Commerce Clause and Wickard v. Filburn. That’s a decision that has basically interpreted the limits of the Commerce Clause into a nullity. True, it’s been chipped away a bit recently, but it’s a prime exemplar of the problem I’m talking about…
In any event, hopefully this discussion is instructive to the OP, in that it shows how even someone who takes the position that abortion rights are wise social policy may nonetheless believe that Roe was incorrectly decided and seek its reversal.
But doesn’t the Wickard-Raich slope show that the slippery slope is a malady that strikes regardless of textual basis? I mean, interstate commerce is pretty damn clear, all things considered. If it is subject to the same kind of judicial jockeying as a right of privacy, it seems like less of a reason to reject privacy and more of a reason to reject political jurisprudence generally. I’m not convinced that SDP jurisprudence is inherently political, though I imagine you’d disagree.
And now that this thread is sufficiently hijacked…
Exactly. Women are too fuzzy-headed to realize that when they get an abortion, they’re getting an abortion. The only reason they do it is because Big Abortion lures them into it.
I wonder…if a OB/GYN who performs abortions gets pregnant herself, and asks her doctor for an abortion…is she both the victim and the culprit? Or did her being female overrule her abortionist nature?
The latter is, or can be, a perfectly consistant position. All it takes is the assertion that government interference in reproductive matters tends to be disastrous. There’s also the related argument that a government with the authority over someone’s body to forbid an abortion, also has the authority to force abortions - you’ve already given it sovereignty over women’s bodies, after all.
It’s just like eugenics. Is it bad that people have children with birth defects ? Does it cause lots of suffering ? Yes, and yes. Does that mean that the government should forbid those it judges defective to have children. No, because history shows that governments with that sort of power abuse it terribly.
Oh, it’s a matter of federal interest. If the power rests with the states, some will outlaw abortion. Some women in those states will go elsewhere to get abortions. Someone will propose a law making it illegal for pregnant women to leave the state. Then Congress or the federal courts will have to get involved, sooner or later.
Even in modern law, there are many different degrees of killing – first-, second-, and third-degree murder; manslaughter; and wrongful death, to name a few examples. It doesn’t automatically follow that the “taking of a human life” should be treated as “murder one.” The law recognizes a wide range of types of killing, including and beyond murder.
Segregation, when enforced by a state or federal agency, is in clear violation of the plain text of the 14th amendment. If a state were to ban abortions, it would not be in violation of the plain text of the constitution. Hence “emanations and penumbras”.
I sit here, bemused, at seeing Bricker, of all people, post in terms of the repeal of a Supreme Court decision.
I was somewhat less bemused to read of Pastor Huckabee, using such phraseology, particularly when I considered the possibility that it might have been placed in his mouth by the Wikipedia contributor.
Bricker, was it merely a matter of inertia in the phrasing as deployed in the thread, or is there yet another bit of layman-level education I need you to pass along?
Sure it is. There are plenty of folks who think that the feds shouldn’t do anything they aren’t explicitly authorized to do in the constitution. Some of us actually think the 10th amendment means something!
Then there’s not much point in having a federal government at all; the states would be better off as independent nations, if your attitude was followed. Or at least California would, and I have no interest in my Federal tax dollars defending, say, a version of Texas that’s re-legalized slavery. Or forbidden abortion, which is much the same thing, just gender focused.
That’s pretty much the way this country operated for its first 150 years of existence. So, yes there are plenty of reasons to have a federal system.
What are you blathering about? Slavery is explicitly forbidden by the constitution.
Well, you asked me why it wasn’t a federal issue. You don’t like federalism. I do. There is nothing objectively wrong with federalism. I’m not going to argue with you about that.
They were not. Both slavery and racial segregation were perfectly constitutional. This was a problem, and it was solved by amending the federal constitution. The Thirteenth Amendment made slavery a federal matter, and forbid it. The Fourteenth Amendment made racial segregation a federal matter, and essentially forbid it.
This would be a perfectly valid course to take for abortion: make it a federal matter by amending the constitution, just as was done to handle the issue of slavery.
Considering that the result was mass slavery, the Civil War, and all the results of those that have never fully healed, it’s an argument AGAINST your view.
And that had to be added because of people with your attitude, that the states have the right to do anything to anyone, unless the Constitution very specifically forbids it. And state’s rights, which you support, was a justification for slavery; if you are right, it should be made legal again. And and the law as it exist doesn’t, keep people from practicing slavery in all but name; something that by your rules should be ignored.
And forbidding abortion is one such example. You’d be perfectly happy to let states forbid abortions, and if that means women suffer or die, it’s not like women are actually people, after all.
I’m pro-choice, but I can agree with his point of view a lot more easily than I can people who are against abortion except in cases of rape or incest, and I guess I kinda respect him for that. Really, if you see a fetus as a human being, what difference does the nature of it’s conception have on it’s right to life? I think the pro-life people who think abortion is OK in cases of rape are really more about punishing the mother than saving the child.
You’d better. God, you’re such a dick for thinking women aren’t people. I mean, since that’s the only basis on which anyone could conceivably be morally opposed to abortion.
