Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

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>> Ruth Bader Ginsburg loved abortion, but thought Roe v Wade was a trash decision that actually risked being thrown out for how sloppy it was. She was right.

> 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.

>its legal reasoning left it vulnerable, which is another way of saying it was weak

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.

> 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.

>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.

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.

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