Interesting, because the way I see it, almost the exact same thing can be said of the original roe v wade decision- the result of a focused campaign for promoting progressive sentiment.
With the recent decision, we can see where it goes back to e.g. the creation of the Federalist Society in 1982, how nearly every conservative Supreme Court nominee since Scalia has been a member (Roberts is disputed but the other 5 current justices are, as were Scalia and Bork), and how some very clever and/or very dirty procedural maneuvering resulted in the conservative majority on the Supreme Court today.
Did that happen with the Burger court that decided Roe? A quick check suggests that of the 9 justices on the Burger court, 4 were nominated by Nixon, 2 by Eisenhower, and 1 each by FDR, JFK, and LBJ. I really have no idea, I'm sure there were plenty of politics involved with all of those as well but I tend to think justices of this era were nominated more on merit than ideology.
What focused campaign are you talking about?
There also wasn't broad-based community support either, otherwise the court wouldn't have needed to step in to override the legislature.
So there must have been something happening ideologically that allowed and convinced these judges to make the decision. Whether we call that thing a 'pressure campaign' or not is political, but there was something going on.
No, it was not. If you read the decision, it is very clearly based on the 14th amendment:
A state criminal abortion statute of the current Texas type, that excepts from criminality only a life-saving procedure on behalf of the mother, without regard to pregnancy stage and without recognition of the other interests involved, is violative of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
— Roe, 410 U.S. at 164.
It doesn't have to, and it's silly to suggest that it needs to. The 9th amendment, in particular, states this clearly.
> the right to privacy used as a justification is suspiciously focused on only abortions to the exclusion of most other things
It is not suspicious. The Court was asked to rule on the Constitutionality of Texas' abortion law. That law was focused on abortions. The Court does not decide a law is unconstitutional for a particular reason, then proactively apply that reason to every other extant law it can find. Honestly, the group upset about Roe would be frothing at the mouth were that to have happened.
> felt confident overturning it on the basis that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion
That was the Dobbs decision, yes. I don't think confidence enters into it, at least not in the way you're suggesting. There's no rubric or success criteria with a SCOTUS decision, and no accountability; justices are not worried about whether they can make a decision or not. They make the decisions they make, based on a vote of the opinions of the people on the Court at the time.
The only confidence that comes into play is where you know you have an unassailable majority and can do what you want.
> also wasn't broad-based community support either
Like there is today? The majority of people in the US today think Roe/Casey should have been left alone. That is as close to a fact as we can have, polling shows it clearly. If you think this decision is popular and what most people wanted, you're living in a bubble.
> So there must have been something happening ideologically that allowed and convinced these judges to make the decision.
Of course, but not in some shady conspiratorial way. The legal reasoning used to decide Roe was not new, it was not invented for that case, and has been applied in a variety of ways both before and since. I'm sure you know about all the sex and marriage related cases - Griswold, Obergefell, Loving v. Virginia, etc. Do you know that substantive due process was also used to protect parents' right to send their kids to private school (Pierce v. Society of Sisters)? Or teach them a foreign language (Meyer v. Nebraska)? There are plenty of other examples.
I am honestly astonished that people are trying to frame Roe as a decision made under duress, or the result of some third party manipulation. It just wasn't. There's no evidence of it. Please, convince me Richard Nixon was somehow manipulated into nominating Harry Blackmun, a very liberal jurist who wrote the majority opinion for Roe. Richard Nixon, who campaigned on law and order, and made 'conservative retrenchment in the court' part of his platform. Roe was decided 7-2! Republican presidents nominated 6 of those justices!
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I'm interested in some unbiased commentary on the Federalist Society stance on things, if such commentary exists. When I read about textualism and originalism, I come away thinking these are the Calvinists of constitutional law: the word is the word, it is true and inerrant, and the writer's intent is meaningless as they were merely a conduit for the truth. IMO this is dangerous, and we've already seen why.
Yes, but as the Supreme Court has since pointed out that was a flawed and incorrect understanding of the 14th amendment. To the point where the current justices felt it reasonable to go back and overturn the decision. And it seems to be quite hard to support the original decision with quotes from the constitution, as people aren't doing that.
I mean, the key part of the text is what? "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."? If we can go from that to "abortions are a right", then we can go literally anywhere. It is logically and practically a non-sequitur, especially in context of other stuff that the government does like military drafts or interference in people's other medical choices.
Not to say I'd be unhappy if "liberty" automatically meant a total autonomy over one's own body. I think that would be a great standard! But we just came through COVID and it is obvious that isn't where the standard is.
> Like there is today? The majority of people in the US today think Roe/Casey should have been left alone. That is as close to a fact as we can have, polling shows it clearly.
It is pretty obvious the current situation is also the result of a focused campaign for promoting state control of abortion legislation. I don't think there is much controversy over that particular part of the story.
* Long march through the institutions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_insti...