Hysteria Rules the Day
Progressives claim no judge should have the power to tell them they can or cannot have an abortion. They do not want to admit it, but they are agreeing with Justice Sam Alito’s point in the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion of Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health. The Court should never have entered the abortion fray.
In 1973, seven men on the United States Supreme Court shut down a debate over abortion in the country. There had never been a right to an abortion in American jurisprudence. Some states were slowly moving that way through legislative acts. But overwhelmingly, Americans did not have the right to an abortion.
Relying on a right to privacy in the fourth amendment, the Supreme Court held in Griswold v. Connecticut that the privacy right extended to contraception use. A few years later, in Roe v Wade, the Court applied that privacy right to abortion and, via the fourteenth amendment, precluded the states from even considering alternatives. Abortion is several steps removed from the periphery of the constitution.
The right to speech, religion, and assembly are all found explicitly in the constitution. The right to gun ownership can be found explicitly in the constitution. The right to privacy can easily be surmised in the constitution. An abortion right was a conjuring act by black robed, life tenured masters of the universe empowered by the infallible language of “because we say so.” Not since Dred Scot had the Court pre-empted a hotly contested issue that, at its heart, was a claim over another person’s body. Instead of imposing the views of the slave owning south, the Court imposed the hedonism of Harvard Yard on America and the country has never been the same.
The Supreme Court is now on the verge of righting that wrong. If you listen carefully to the conversations of hysterics on television, the arguments are all about the policy choices of abortion, the costs to women, and the injustice of the Supreme Court taking away a right no one can find in the constitution or the history of American jurisprudence. No one talks about the children being killed. As importantly, no one talks about the constitutional jurisprudence. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg conceded Roe was a terribly decided case even as she supported abortion rights.
Since 1973, the pro-life movement has done what the pro-abortion movement has not done, i.e. play by the rules of the democratic process. The pro-abortion movement has hidden behind courts and progressive regulators. Pro-lifers started electing pro-life legislators. When the Democratic Party shifted firmly to the left, the pro-life movement gave up on Democrats and focused on the Republican Party. They elected pro-life presidents. They advanced pro-life senators. They pushed for and fostered an academic field of law that trained new lawyers who would become pro-life judges who would advance to the United States Supreme Court.