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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhat Roe Could Take Down With It
The logic being used against Roe could weaken the legal foundations of many rights Americans value deeply.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/what-roe-could-take-down-it/620892/
The consensus of Supreme Court watchers after Wednesdays oral argument in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization is that the demise of Roe v. Wade, or at least its dilution to a point that virtually any government-imposed burden on abortion would be constitutionally acceptable, is coming. After all, this Court allowed a Texas law effectively banning most abortions after six weeks to stand pending litigation, rejecting multiple pleas for a temporary stayas clear a signal as any that at least five justices on the current Court have no problem with womens constitutional rights (as currently recognized) being violated in the interim.
Many of the dangers of overruling Roe have been long discussed. If women lose the right to an abortion, pregnancy-related deaths are estimated to rise substantially and suddenly. (Currently, 26 states have so-called trigger laws on the books that would outlaw most abortions the moment the Court reverses Roe.) The impact of Roes fall would hit low-income women especially hard, as theyre five times as likely as affluent women to experience unplanned childbearing and twice as likely to face sexual violence.
Those are the dangers of restricting access to abortion. The thing is, the dangers of dispensing with Roe go far beyond abortion, because the legal logic that threatens this particular right could quite easily extend to others, inviting states to try out new laws that regulate choices about whom to marry, whom to be intimate with, what contraception to use, and how to rear ones own children. The contention that Roe is uniquely built on a foundation of sand ignores the inconvenient fact that lots of other rights are not expressly articulated in the Constitution. The question that a reversal of Roe accordingly poses is whether the textualists and originalists on this conservative-heavy Court would allow those implied rights to go by the wayside as well.
Most people tether Roes legal foundations to the right to privacy identified in Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 decision striking down state laws rendering illegal the use of contraceptives by married couples. The Court ultimately identified a constitutional right to privacy within protective penumbras that emanate from the Bill of Rightsin particular the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendmentsand reasoned that these penumbras operate to shield an intimate relation of husband and wife and their physicians role in one aspect of that relation from government intrusion. Picking up on Griswold in 1973, the Court in Roe acknowledged that the Constitution does not explicitly mention any right to privacy, but seized on the earlier cases recognition of a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy to strike down a Texas law criminalizing abortion.
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What Roe Could Take Down With It (Original Post)
Celerity
Dec 2021
OP
ANY right and/or liberty is now subject to constitutional scrutiny as they aren't guaranteed.
no_hypocrisy
Dec 2021
#1
no_hypocrisy
(46,117 posts)1. ANY right and/or liberty is now subject to constitutional scrutiny as they aren't guaranteed.
Segregation could be returned to the same states ready to ban abortion.