Comment by Brybry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Brybry | Hacker News Reader

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It doesn't really have to do with a law (which is a large part of the issue, the dysfunction of congress forces these controversies).

It's about unenumerated rights and interpretation of liberty under the 14th Amendment.

> nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law

So in the past the court said liberty includes a right to privacy, which also includes things like having a right to buy and use contraceptives (Griswold v. Connecticut). This was extended to include women having a right to an abortion, with some qualifiers (the right was not unlimited, it said states did have some interest in protecting both the mother's health and fetus health).

The current court decision says that, while those other unenumerated rights have been found, they're different because they don't involve an "unborn human being".[1]

Thus they imply that a few cells (under some state laws this would be from the moment of fertilization) have rights that supersede (or at least conflict) with an actual person's right to have their liberty protected from the State.

The Louisiana state legislature has a bill introduced right now that seems to make abortion homicide, both for the mother who receives the abortion and anyone who administers it. [2][3]

[1] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21835435/scotus-initi...

[2] https://www.legis.la.gov/legis/ViewDocument.aspx?d=1276214

[3] https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/politics/legisl...

> Thus they imply that a few cells (under some state laws this would be from the moment of fertilization) have rights that supersede (or at least conflict) with an actual person's right to have their liberty protected from the State.

This is a bizarre misreading. It doesn't say that. It says that the Constitution does not grant them the power to invalidate a state law against abortion, because Roe erred in determining that the 14th Amendment right to privacy entailed a right to abort a pregnancy.

(I'm not against abortion, for the record, but I'm increasingly disappointed with the facile arguments I hear about it. Of course this Supreme Court decision is not a 'religious decision that the fetus is a human being', my God.)

That loses the context of what I wrote. I'm trying to say that basically one of these two things are true.

if this ruling's argument is: ( unenumerated && !fit with history/traditions 200 years ago ) == states can ban

then every other 'right' we have like gay marriage, contraception, porn, anal sex, basically anything not written in the constitution that a bunch of white people 200 years ago didn't do regularly, could be made illegal state by state.

OR

This is a sham justification to further their religious beliefs and the ruling should simply write that a fetus has some type of special rights that supersede.

At least that ruling would be honest about their obvious bias and plain intent.

> What sharply distinguishes the abortion right from the rights recognized in the cases on which Roe and Casey rely is something that both those decisions acknowledged: Abortion destroys what those decisions call “potential life” and what the law at issue in this case regards as the life of an “unborn human being.”

How is that not saying that because abortion specifically involves a few cells then the right to an abortion is not the same as other privacy rights?

Yes, elsewhere they make other arguments about tradition with regards to abortion not being a privacy right. They don't use a singular argument.

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