Republicans Want to Overturn Roe v. Wade, and They May Soon Be Able To
Growing up during the 1980s and 1990s, my second-wave feminist mother, writer Erica Jong, was obsessed with Roe v. Wade. Born in 1942, she came of age in a world without safe legal abortion. She knew what was at stake with the 1973 ruling that protected a woman’s right to choose “without excessive government restriction.” Roe v. Wade was a huge victory for my mother’s generation. They could point to the Supreme Court decision as something tangible they did; their blood and sweat had changed the calculus of women’s lives. “No more women will die of back-alley abortions,” my mother would say. “No more wire hangers.”
When Trump came down that gold escalator on June 16, 2015, to announce his presidential run, there was speculation that a thrice-married adulterer might even be pro-choice. But that was before he said, “There has to be some form of punishment for abortion.” Trump even said that he would install two Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, telling the polymaths at Fox & Friends, “It’s certainly possible. And maybe they do it in a different way. Maybe they’d give it back to the states. You just don’t know what’s going to happen.”
The irony is, Roe v. Wade is popular. A NPR/PBS poll released in 2019 showed that 77% of Americans believed that the Supreme Court should uphold Roe v. Wade. And making abortion illegal doesn’t actually prevent it. As Zara Ahmed writes, “Abortion rates are actually four times higher in low-income countries where abortion is prohibited than in high-income countries where it is broadly legal.”
This week, the dynamic in this long debate took on new dimensions when the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that could and likely will result in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, is a chance for the Supreme Court to rule on the Mississippi law that forbids abortions after 15 weeks. The law was largely created in order to be kicked up to the Supreme Court and give conservatives the opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade. Previously, it had ruled that bans on abortion before viability—about 24 weeks—were unconstitutional. A decision here would open the door to other conservative states being able to ban abortion.
https://www.vogue.com/article/abortion-supreme-court
= new reply since forum marked as read
I wish the pro-choice groups would add this argument to their toolbox.
2010
Forced Labor, Revisited: The Thirteenth Amendment and Abortion
Andrew Koppelman
Northwestern University School of Law, akoppelman@law.northwestern.edu
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1031&context=facultyworkingpapers
snip...
I. The basic argument The Thirteenth Amendment reads as follows:
1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
My claim is that the amendment is violated by laws that prohibit abortion. When women are compelled to carry and bear children, they are subjected to "involuntary servitude" in violation of the amendment. Abortion prohibitions violate the Amendment's guarantee of personal liberty, because forced pregnancy and childbirth, by compelling the woman to serve the fetus, creates "that control by which the personal service of one man [sic] is disposed of or coerced for another's benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude."6
Such laws violate the amendment's guarantee of equality, because forcing women to be mothers makes them into a servant caste, a group which, by virtue of a status of birth, is held subject to a special duty to serve others and not themselves.
~more at link
Parents can't be compelled to donate their organs to their child, even to save the child's life. Why does a fetus have more claim on a woman's body than her child who has been born?
THE MOST IMPORTANT DECISION A WOMAN CAN MAKE ISN'T YOURS.
