The Supreme Court Gaslights Its Way to the End of Roe.by Linda Greenhouse
'There are many reasons for dismay over the Supreme Court argument in the Mississippi abortion case, but it was the nonstop gaslighting that really got to me.
First there was Justice Clarence Thomas, pretending by his questions actually to be interested in how the Constitution might be interpreted to provide for the right to abortion, a right he has denounced and schemed to overturn since professing to the Senate Judiciary Committee 30 years ago that he never even thought about the matter.
Then there was Chief Justice John Roberts, mischaracterizing an internal memo that Justice Harry Blackmun wrote to his colleagues as the Roe v. Wade majority was discussing how best to structure the opinion Justice Blackmun was working on. The chief justice was trying to delegitimize the place of fetal viability in the courts abortion jurisprudence, where for nearly 50 years, viability has been the unbreached firewall protecting the right of a woman to choose to terminate a pregnancy.
Its an unfortunate source, but its there, he said, referring to Justice Blackmuns papers, on file and open to the public at the Library of Congress. In his papers, Justice Blackmun said that the viability line was actually was dicta.
Dicta is a dismissive word that refers to asides in an opinion that are not actually part of the courts holding. . .
In that memo, of course referring to what was still a work in progress, Justice Blackmun proposed that the right to abortion be fully protected only until the end of the first trimester of pregnancy. This is arbitrary, he wrote, but perhaps any other selected point, such as quickening or viability, is equally arbitrary.
But two weeks later, after consulting with other justices, including Lewis Powell and Thurgood Marshall, Justice Blackmun circulated another memo endorsing the viability line. Far from describing this determination as arbitrary, he wrote in a memo dated Dec. 11, 1972, that viability has logical and biological justifications, namely, that few could argue, or would argue, that a states interest by the time of viability, when independent life is presumably possible, is not sufficiently developed to justify appropriate regulation.
In other words, by the time the court issued the final opinion in January 1973, viability was not dicta but rather an essential element of the decision.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/opinion/abortion-supreme-court.html
dalton99a
(81,514 posts)Sibelius Fan
(24,396 posts)elleng
(130,960 posts)How defined???
Sibelius Fan
(24,396 posts)Its only a matter of degree. As a foundational element, moderate Xians are just as delusional as the extremists, because believing in make believe as a life guide is extremist no matter how you cut it.
OneCrazyDiamond
(2,032 posts)President Biden, and Speaker Pelosi in that lot?
Sibelius Fan
(24,396 posts)BeckyDem
(8,361 posts)Chip away at the right to access a safe abortion has been going on too long, and I do not trust this court.