> No she didn't and no it wasn't. RvW ruled that in order to be free, people have an implicit right to privacy when making personal medical decisions.
Eh, not so much. It's probably an overstatement that she thought it was a "trash decision," but she definitely believed it was a tactical mistake and that its legal reasoning left it vulnerable, which is another way of saying it was weak.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/us/ruth-bader-ginsburg-ro...
> Obviously moral busybodies don't like that so they're calling it "overreach".
I think there's room to be more nuanced and have views about abortion and legal reasoning that are separate and distinct.
As if any of that mattered in the end. The Supreme Court ruled how it did because it's dominated by religious conservatives that don't like abortion.
Or its dominated by legal conservatives who have different ideas about constitutional interpretation than the Warren Court, put there by politicians whose constituents oppose abortion.
To me at least Roe v. Wade seems to have, in effect, been a constitutional amendment via means that bypassed the normal political process for such things. Unless you're a very "ends justify the means" kind of person, that raises concerns that would introduce a vulnerability into anything accomplished that way.
Exactly, those judges were determined to stop abortions, it didn't matter how strong or weak the legal arguments of RvW were, or whether or not the legislature codified it in law or not. They would have jumped through any number of legal hoops to stop people from getting abortions.
Yeah. The rhetoric on this is so overheated that I'm convinced that some people actually believe Roe v. Wade is the Third Amendment [1] or something like that. IHMO, this debate would be a lot better if people could distinguish between policy and the law/legal reasoning as separate things.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-3/
(Everything I'm writing about is under Held)
Morality plays in some way. Basically, Roe tried to rewrite and ignore some history, according to the court, in order to establish an implicit privacy principle in the constitution. Where the morality comes in is that the court clearly fears things like hooking and drug use (which they mention explicitly in the ruling) and they tie this to Roe and Casey's arguments about privacy and autonomy while also demonstrating that Casey tried to eschew many of Roes arguments. They kept referring to this as "ordered liberty" which I took for morality.
Therein lies the rub though, as Alito said. Without a right to privacy - or explicitly stated "liberty" the court then has to review what the people want. Half the country is on a spectrum within a spectrum about morality, and the other half is on a different spectrum within a spectrum. He also called out a third group, which wants abortion under certain circumstances. Thus, the court then reverts to history, which abortion has been historically highly illegal.
So, some technical, some historical, some moral.
Would an actual privacy amendment really provide a pathway for abortion is my broader question.
I don't think that's what that meant. I think the meaning was more along the lines of "liberty, but not everything-goes liberty." It's defined in the dictionary as "freedom limited by the need for order in society" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/legal/ordered%20liberty), and appears to be legal/political science jargon with some history behind it.
Perhaps, but you seemed to be saying you took is as synonymous with morality, which doesn't seem like a correct reading. Morality doesn't seem to be very key to the concept, if it's even there at all.
https://www.annenbergclassroom.org/glossary_term/liberty/
> Ordered liberty is the desirable condition in which both public order and personal liberty are maintained. But how can liberty and authority, freedom and power, be combined and balanced so that one does not predominate over the other? This was the basic problem of constitutional government that concerned the founders of the United States, and it has continued to challenge Americans as democracy has evolved and expanded throughout the history of their country. Early on, James Madison noted the challenges of ordered liberty in a 1788 letter to Thomas Jefferson: ‘‘It is a melancholy reflection that liberty should be equally exposed to danger whether the Government has too much or too little power; and that the line which divides these extremes should be so inaccurately defined by experience.’’
Which history? Under English common law, abortion was allowed until 20 weeks, and that persisted in the US until the mid-to-end 19th century. Then a century of bans, then Roe v Wade, and now blanket bans. There is far more "abortion is allowed until X" history than anything else.
Also, this is not a "blanket ban", that would be a misinterpretation of the ruling. Instead, states now choose (aka "the people"). Not that I support it, but words matter.
It also assumes that every catholic is anti-abortion. People and their beliefs are more complex than that.
Justice Roberts is "Catholic" but has voted against his religion every time on this issue, and would have spared Roe in his opinion if possible.
Justice Sotomayor is also "Catholic" but has also voted against her religion every time on this issue.
Justice Barrett is "Catholic" but is a member of "People of Praise," a group which many Catholics find suspicious on both sides, both for not being progressive but also being very charismatic and untraditional in its liturgical style.
Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh are all Catholic, but aren't really voting the way a full-on Catholic-everywhere would. Alito and Kavanaugh have said they aren't interested in revisiting the constitutionality of birth control and same sex marriage at this point, and Kavanaugh voted 6-3 with the rest of SCOTUS that gender orientation was protected by the Civil Rights Act which upset many more devout Catholics.
We've raised a 2-3 generation on popular dogma in which human life is the most sacred thing imaginable and now we have a society full of people do not generally posses the requisite mental faculties to have adult discussion about subjects that involve harm to people (or apparently fetuses). We're reaping what we sowed.
You see this same "arrive at an obviously sub-optimal solution because we can't nut up and cause a little quantifiable harm to get to the better solution" problem across many subjects. Abortion is just one of the most obvious.
Every culture does inflate the value of human life and a society is well served by doing exactly that. Technically this is ideology or religion too, but so is everything you put on a pedestal instead. But that isn't at all a detriment for the argument for abortion even from a purely utilitarian point of view that acknowledges reality that abortions will happen if they are legal or illegal. I do think some societal and cultural problems do increase the number of abortions significantly and there are significantly less arguments against those that want to reduce abortions.
> can't nut up and cause a little quantifiable harm to get to the better solution
This is impotent reasoning. What is sub-optimal? From which perspective and for whom? Acknowledging reality does also mean that there aren't that many people that wish they were aborted. It is a gray decision but "nutting up" is no solution.
It seems that the path of money is from laity to church to dark money group(?) to political campaigns for judges or buying support for judge’s confirmations. However it happens, people should know their tithes are being used against them.
[1] https://www.ncronline.org/news/68-us-catholics-say-roe-shoul...