If most people agree that it should be a constitutional right, no one stops the legislature from adding the required amendment. And if most people can't agree on that, well, adding that wouldn't be democratic.
This isn't a codebase refactor, this is people's lives. Pulling this ruling before you have "what the people want" in place is like deleting a feature you plan on rebuilding later before you actually rebuild it.
Nobody in their right mind thinks that's a good idea in any other context, so why would it make sense here?
I do NOT share that viewpoint. But we are a republic. And the Supreme Court doesn’t issue law, that’s Congress’s responsibility.
What this represents is not a code refactor but a Change to a comment in the code base on what a function does.
The Supreme Court didn't issue a law here, they changed their interpretation of a decision they had made 50 years prior, for no reason at all except that the composition of the court had changed.
That's like hiring a new guy and his first action is to remove an entire technology that was propping up your infrastructure, because it wasn't being stored in the "correct" VCS.
In that case would you want the court to instead state, well a decision 50 years ago was made. So we wont change it. The US Congress needs to pass a law explicitly granting woman the right to vote. Such-as with say Minor v. Happersett, "Court held that, while women are no less citizens than men are, citizenship does not confer a right to vote, and therefore state laws barring women from voting are constitutionally valid"
A good court in a Democratic government must be objective in interpretation of law . And the system is such that it is the US Congress's responsibility to pass law.
There is zero legitimate reason for this to be reversed now, compared to after it’s been codified in the legislature.
But all of this is a silly distraction. The real reason has nothing at all to do with what the court’s role should be, and everything to do with the religion of the people currently serving on the court.
To keep the tech analogies going, it’s like a new tech lead deleting the web app code because be doesn’t believe in monorepos, but saying it’s a security issue.
You’re inferring that the court made it’s decision on a religious reason, and you’re entitled to your inference.
So here’s my inference, as an atheist conservative. No the Supreme Court did not overturn the case for religious reasons. They overturned it exactly for the reasons they stated:
“The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives”
The legitimate reason it is reversed _now_ is that it is _now_ when the matter is before them in the court of law that conflicts with Roe in a way that is hard to reconcile against precedent.
If your complaint is that it hasn't been codified into law by the legislature since 1973 (and you're right -- it hasn't) that is not the fault of the judicial branch, rather the legislative.
To borrow from your analogy, it's more like a repository deprecating its code, watching everybody for years claim that "they're going to delete this any minute now" and nobody stepping to the plate to take over as maintainer.
When your action is the proximate cause of the revocation of freedom from 165m people, it's definitely 'your fault'."
This may not have been a great way to keep women safe forever, but today was not the day it needed fixing.
It is not the job of the Supreme Court to care for the reproductive health of the American people. Of the federal government, that would either be the job of the executive or the legislature, depending on your preferred view of the executive branch.
If the Supreme Court cannot do this, it should not exist.
It exists to referee the non-violent resolution of a subset of emotionally charged disputes through a functioning legal system. It does not exist to ensure that one side or the other wins.
At least four sitting justices were put on the court specifically to ensure this ruling occurred.
Those things are only useful if they help people. The root purpose of any system of government to exist is to provide for the health and happiness of the governed.
If any system of government fails to do that, it is broken, and the fact that you've lost sight of the entire purpose of government is both sad and entirely predictable.
And cool it with the personal attacks. That kind of behavior is inappropriate.
And it's in the court now because this is the first time in 50 years that we've had a court regressive enough to vote it down.
It hadn't been codified in law because there wasn't a need because the court's had settled the issue.
To follow your analogy it's like finally removing that deprecated code after 50 years and seeing side-effects across the code base that are hugely disruptive to a tiny percent of users and anger inducing to a majority, while also making a minority of users feel smug about it finally being removed.
This is silly. It's basically always in the courts. This particular case has been ongoing since 2018 IIRC. Before that it was June Medical. Before that it was Whole Women's Health v Hellerstedt.
> It hadn't been codified in law because there wasn't a need because the court's had settled the issue
Except it had not legislatively, and it needed to have been. At the same time as Ruth Bader Ginsburg was lamenting the flaws of Roe halting legislative process that she knew still needed to happen, Joe Biden was proposing amendments to overturn Roe v Wade so that abortion could be outlawed.
It is and always has been balanced on the head of a pin. Both sides have of course been using it more as a platform for fund-raising than doing anything legislatively, while warning that the other side was moments away from winning. Please donate $5, $10, or $50 to the cause.
The boundaries of Roe v Wade have been debated for a looong time, especially as new medical technology have come out but this case only existed because conservatives believed they had a good chance of overturning Roe.
That isn't a good analogy. A better analogy is the security team modifying ACLs that allow them push changes. It may be a destructive change, but it's outside of scope of the security team.
Shouldn't have been in the CS datacenter, so screw the customers and the business as a whole who relied on that system, right?
Except the vast majority do support abortion. I really don't care what "a large portion" of America thinks, the majority thinks it should be a right but due to the way we cast votes for presidents we have the minority picking supreme court seats and thus giving us this decision.
That is not true, they are a very loud minority. Most polling puts people who really care about banning abortion (in the ways it is being done right now) at below 20%.
The reason it is not passing legislation is because the Senate (which is required) is not a democratic institution. A state like Wyoming has 65x more voting power than a state like California. Current the Senate sits at 50/50 yet one side represents 40M more citizens than the other.
Is this backed up by data or your personal view? Because every piece of data that I've seen is that only ~30% of americans support a ban of abortion, while the large majority are in favor for it being legal.
30% is a “large portion of America”, is it not? It may not be a majority, but it’s enough to be a majority in some states.
Within the bounds of what is permitted by the Constitution. If you believe that bodily autonomy is a fundamental right guaranteed in the Constitution, then laws are irrelevant, as this is outside the bounds of what law is permitted to be written.
Body autonomy means I don't have to catch a disease because other people are too selfish to get a vaccine that is only experimental in the same way air and water is experimental.
I never said they were. But if you're going to make an argument about bodily autonomy then how you can you be OK with forcing people getting a medical treatment they do not want?
Vaccination protects you from the disease. Vaccinating a 3rd party does not, we've been over this already.
The COVID vaccine was in fact experimental and it only received an "Emergency Use Authorization" by the FDA. How about you check some basic facts before you respond?
The Republicans fought tooth and nail against even simple mask mandates but now want to legislate what happens in a woman's uterus in the name of "protecting life"? What a joke.
Yes, it was also hilarious to see Democrat politicians vacationing in Florida maskless while their constituents had to follow illogical mask rules back home. Heck, in some cases they don't even pretend to care about these rules themselves (see MET gala and the countless of "parties" these politicians went to maskless).
> now want to legislate what happens in a woman's uterus in the name of "protecting life"? What a joke.
The supreme court did not ban abortion, so your argument is moot here. I'm personally OK with abortion in the early stages. But I'd argue that there's a line where a woman's "bodily autonomy" ends and a prenate's bodily autonomy begins where abortion becomes more than the equivalent of removing an appendix.
65% of the USA currently says that Roe v. Wade shouldn't be overturned.
We should give some deference to precedent, but the rule of law is paramount. Consider what the opposite of the rule of law really entails, or how hard won that victory was.
What is legal != what is just, ethical, or moral.
Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. We can't organize society to run on what is just, ethical, or moral. We can only make laws based on our understanding of those things. Our understanding of morality changes over time. Where the law is unjust, we should change the law. Abandoning the rule law ends badly.
I am willing to empathize with the denial of service but thats it.
Congress was the more appropriate federal authority to be a legislature, and failed to do so. In the absence of a federal law passed by Congress, state ones are the only ones that matter.
The topic of how long the ruling lasted is a complete red herring, as this is not out of character for the court at all.
I don’t feel like the convenience of having the court being so hard to overrule is a good enough reason for it to act as a superlegislature when convenient.
I am the same way on this regarding all topics. On this specific topic, in the past I had tried to point out how odd Roe v Wade was with the court acting as a superlegislature but I quickly learned this was not a conversation people were willing to have as they couldnt separate the “camps” from the case(s) so I stopped bringing it up. I’m glad that this case forces the conversation.
Are you really going to pretend not to understand why this ruling came now, when the religious right just so happened to be in charge of the Supreme Court, and not at any other time in the past 50 years?
I completely understand that only one party is willing to make that interpretation on this topic. I think it is noteworthy that “the religious right” did not act as a superlegislature itself, given the opportunity, and simply removed it back to Congress or the states when in the absence of a law from Congress.
I observe that there are or were other ways to reach the outcome that the other party wants, that party has bungled all of those ways, and will likely continue to do so.
Not caring about the people for whom the system is designed for is exactly what makes this such a monumental problem. If the system doesn't work for the people it's designed to work for, it the outcomes don't reflect their will, then it's a broken system.
If this is the "correct" way, then the system might need to be torn down and rebuilt, possibly violently. Consider that as you avoid empathizing with those affected.
Possibly less so to their loved ones, some of whom may act violently in response to a system that killed a person they care about.
I doubt they're going to care meaningfully about which legal mechanism it was that would have been most appropriate to use to allow their loved one to live.
Contact your state and Congressional representations and find legislative candidates that are as passionate on this topic as you are, if there arent other causes you are more passionate about that different candidates care about of course.
It is accurate that several judges lied to Congress during their nomination process and we do not have remedies or sanctions for that. (That are deemed politically rational)
Paradoxically, the Roe decision created the division that has far extremes. A false dilemma of which there are many other possibilities. Also something those two justices agreed on.
Congress avoided the topic for 50 straight years, masquerading the ruling as good enough, now it continues to lack consensus for anything else, its up to the people to attempt something else. If consensus cannot be reached then consensus cannot be reached, which is something I empathize with, people need to optimize their use more effectively and conform it to the consensus mechanisms of this country. Generate proposals that are more inspired and would have broader consensus, of which I do have a few.
Do you imagine, if the Republicans control all three branches of government, that they would not create a federal law that bans abortions everywhere?
All signals point to that, and the overturning of Roe vs. Wade is there to remove friction to get there.
As the pendulum swings, so does policy. It would be more difficult IMHO if there were more than two parties.
If the voting public of the US shifts to where it adopts a view you disagree with then of course the democratic institution would continue to reflect the public.
But we have good reason to believe this will never happen. Polling shows that most individuals support a woman's right to abortion. And even if the Republican party gained control of all 3 branches, they aren't a monolithic and unified block when it comes to policy. "States rights" is a HUGE motivation for most Republicans, and a federal policy banning abortion would be a big stumbling block for getting the votes to pass such legislation even with a Republican majority.
Also consider what the Texas GOP has said about gays and gay marriage over the last week.
First off, It was a momentous decision. It did not "merely" decide anything.
Second, a right does not need to be explicitly spelled out in the constitution to be a constitutionally protected right. The right to an abortion is a clear and rational outgrowth of the constitutional protections of privacy and bodily autonomy (IE, the right to not have the government mess with our shit for no good reason).
Making decisions intuitively can be useful. It is not necessarily wrong. It does have the benefit of being energy-efficient. :) See "Thinking Fast and Slow".
In any case, I hope we can move beyond rationalizing, particularly as a deceptive technique.
I'm probably overthinking a throwaway internet comment.
One of those things is not like the others.
That's a fallacious argument. No one threatened me with jail for not getting vaccinated and no one threatened the medical folks who gave me my vaccines with jail either.
There are millions of people who may go to prison for providing a private, personal medical procedure. That's wrong.
I'd note that Mississippi and Missouri have both charged women who had miscarriages with capital murder.
Like I said, no one threatened me (or anyone else, for that matter) with jail for getting (or not getting) vaccinated, did they?
Nor was anyone threatened with jail for refusing to vaccinate people.
Whereas, many state laws threaten prison (and even face the death penalty) for those who have or provide abortions.
Go to Prison != Folks don't want to be around you if you're more likely to get them sick with a potentially deadly disease.
So, no. It's not the same thing at all.
If you can't see the difference, nothing I say will mean anything to you.
I wish you the best.
Yes, the covid vaccine has been used as a condition of probation, and for reduced sentences[0].
>Folks don't want to be around you if you're more likely to get them sick
That does not supersede someone's bodily autonomy. If you are scared of being around unvaccinated people, don't go out in public.
0. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/us/ohio-judge-covid-vacci...
It's a also comparing a response to an acute global crisis to laws dealing with a routine medical issue (pregnancy) that ~50% of the population will experience in their lifetime.
People agree on that. Adding it to the constitution hasn’t happened because politics.
While that will not be true, access to abortion will be very limited everywhere. With 26 states limiting it seriously and no constitutional protections on getting abortions in a different state, you could see a vast majority of population not have access to abortions.
Even if everyone starts traveling for abortions, a huge amount of the population won’t be able to travel. And the ones who travel will stress the medical facilities to the extent that people living in states that have legal abortion access, will still have it’s populations access to abortions severely limited.
It doesn’t matter if 2/3 Americans don’t know what it actually means. What matters is 2/3 Americans want access to abortions, and that access will be severely limited regardless of whether it’s legal in your state.
This is surely not true. Forty percent of the US population lives in states with laws protecting access to abortion. The AP is reporting that 20 states have heavy restrictions/bans, and the remainder are to-be-determined. [1]
I've seen the 26 state reference floating around on social media and wonder which states are included, beyond what news outlets are reporting. I'm open to the possibility that the AP has this wrong — the reason I'd like to know the source of the 26 figure is to compare it to the mostly-trusted sources that are giving lower numbers.
To be clear, I'm not weighing in on whether today's decision is good or bad. I just wanted to clear up some of the statistics that people hear a lot, since they are sometimes based on misunderstandings of the law (which are reasonable since the case was decided a long time ago, and until recently most people thought it would not be overturned anytime soon, if ever).
1: https://apnews.com/article/abortion-supreme-court-decision-8...
I'm not sure what the exact right number is, but it probably comes down to the details and how you classify them.
cf. Gerrymandering.
and no matter what, you're dealing with laws regarding the bodily autonomy of 50% of the populace. if that can't be considered a fundamental right, what really can?
"We have held that the “established method of substantive-due-process analysis” requires that an unenumerated right be “‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’” before it can be recognized as a component of the “liberty” protected in the Due Process Clause. Glucksberg, 521 U. S., at 721; cf. Timbs, 586 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 7)."
There is a lengthy appendix to the ruling that goes through the list of prior state laws that criminalized abortion and shows that a right to abortion is not, in fact, "deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition".
edit: i was wrong about the trigger laws having exceptions for life endangering pregnancies - its the new laws the same people are passing that remove the exceptions. I still stand by my statement, because the "completely correct" ruling allows those exceptions to be removed.
Their claims about history and tradition so far have been historically inaccurate, or limited to only arch-conservative Christian traditions.
None of this is to mention a deeper fundamental problem with only looking at history and tradition in such a literal way: for women or men who are not white straight Christians, they haven't actually had equal rights for all that long. Arguably, the right to marry is a pretty fundamental Natural Right and has only been recognized starting in 2004.
These are master orators who no longer care about perceived legitimacy or stare decisis. They will continue to do whatever they want because they can, and make up the justification as they go along.
The issue is that we're forced into a two party system. If someone thinks "I want abortion rights, but the culture wars are more important to me" they vote republican. A large block of the republican base is single issue religious voters, so even if a majority of the republican voters want abortion rights they will never pass because the religious voters will primary anyone who supports abortion.
I think there is a simple way to interpret that: a lot of people thought that Roe v. Wade meant that they didn't have to think about abortion. And they liked that, even if they didn't think it was the ideal way to resolve the issue. They simply cared more about other issues, like the PPACA subsidy gaps, environmental sustainability, gun rights, taxes, drugs, et cetera, ad nauseam. Even during the Barrett and Kavanaugh nominations, there were plenty of people, including the nominally pro-choice (e.g. a certain Senator from Maine), who argued that Roe v. Wade was not in danger, which was most likely wishful thinking.
So your idea doesn't work, and in fact nothing works. The era when a voter or politician can (effectively) ignore abortion as a substantive political issue is over, and it isn't coming back.
The Supreme Court includes multiple justices put there in no small part due to lobbying by conservative faith groups, and as part of their lobbying plan, several states have trigger laws on the books that immediately make abortion legal in many states. The Supreme Court’s decision is the immediate cause of these “trigger laws” going into effect. It’s a part of a larger concerted effort, so this is a distinction with little difference for anyone living in these states or who may find themselves sued in Texas for providing abortions to a Texan who crossed into their state.
Punishing the poor and economically disadvantaged in red and blue states as political reprisal is the stupidest idea I've read all day.
What are you accomplishing besides making yourself feel good at the literal expense of the most vulnerable?
What you're suggesting also affects anyone that votes blue in red states, including business owners and workers that are trying to change their state laws.
Changing the law is harder when you're calling to economically punish those businesses and they have to layoff workers or close. So instead of campaigning on the weekend and persuading people to vote to change the state law, workers will be looking a new job. This maintains the status quo rather than help garner support to change it.
What you're suggesting is regressive and hurts the pro-choice movement in red states.
Meanwhile bunch of states will make abortions illegal. I think Texas already has with some technicalities but correct me if I am wrong.
Additional states will follow soon, but there is no "meanwhile" for a lot of the country. It's already done.
Eg France bans abortion after 14 weeks; Norway bans it after 12 weeks.
Florida will not be a state where abortions happen soon enough.
Which means that New York, California, Massachusetts will retain abortion access. And Texas, Indiana, will remove abortion access.
This sounds like States rights is actually working.
But the media is distorting the overturning of Roe vs Wade with the sensational claim that “Abortion is banned in the US”.
No, it’s not banned. This just means Texas and New York have differing policies with regards to abortion access. Yes, 46 million women living in conservative states will lose access to abortion, but not all of those women are liberal quite frankly. Moreover, those states are exactly that: conservative. And the Conservative Majority of that state isn’t required to accommodate the views of the Liberal minority of that state.
Just like the Liberal Majority of California isn’t required to accommodate their Conservative Minorities.
That’s the nature of how US Democratic institutions were built.
Sounds fair to me and the Supreme Court made the correct decision by returning that authority back to the states.
Also, you need to ask yourself: is this about abortion? Or is it really about literally keeping the people poor, stupid and uneducated?
Think about it: if you're not poor this is not an issue. If you have 5 kids instead of 1, good luck getting them the proper education. But it's cool...we can use all that almost free labor to drive our corporate empires forward.
Because it was poorly reasoned judicial activism and always has been. The amount of time that a decision stands should have no bearing on how good of a decision it is.
One of the dissents in Casey v Planned Parenthood in 92 also wanted to overturn Roe, for the same reasons that the current court did.
Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought that Roe v Wade was poorly reasoned.
They could have applied their logic uniformly but bizarrely singled out an abortion case.
They intentionally chose to go for the contradictory choice of singling out abortion while not attacking the root -- which suggests to me think this is more about judicial activism than upholding the constitution.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg made it her career to overturn precedents around women's rights that had been around far longer than 50 years.
Please answer the same question, but for slavery.
Setting aside political posturing: Who cannot get an abortion today? Even in deep red states, if you're wealthy the same rules do not apply to you.
Are you saying we're going to have a second civil war over abortion?
I'm not sure what the civil war has to do with applying logic consistently to see how it is fallacious.
The more I see, the more I believe a civil war is not off the table. In fact it's becoming more and more likely each day. We have 2 camps today and people are more and more divided. There used to be a time when you could... talk about the issue and use logic and arguments around facts. Not anymore. Abortion will not lead to a civil war - not on its own - but it does add extra pressure to a pressure cooker that's about to blow up.
What makes you think that this has no effect on the millions of people capable of giving birth in the US? What makes you think that this will have no effect on their partner, or the overall well-being of the child, once birthed?
Personally I think the root cause is an alliance between people with hateful beliefs and people that want the government not to tax or regulate large companies and rich families. Fine, slut shame people because they had sex and got pregnant (no matter the circumstances) and let us keep sponsoring fake research that carbon burn is good. Be openly racist again and lower those taxes even at the cost of not educating the young.
Just my theory tho. Hard to know.