Friday’s momentous Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v WadeLeftist politicians are screaming and news anchors are sputtering. Twitter is ablaze with commentary from both sides. These are all loud voices and few people seem to have read it.
It is what it really means.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote this final opinion, which is very similar to the May draft. This opinion was ruled upon Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health OrganizationIt was about a Mississippi law which prohibited abortion after 15-weeks of gestation. Arguably, the most crucial line of the ruling is found on the 1st page of the pdf 213-page document.I emphasize mine:
Held:Roe and Casey do not grant a right of abortion. The Constitution is overruled and those who have the power to regulate abortion are returned to their constituents.
Boom. The people are now in control. It was there it had to be all along.
On page 4, in one of his most powerful paragraphs, Alito dunked on the 1973 court for “usurping power”:
Roe had been on a collision course to the Constitution since the decision was made. Casey continued its mistakes, but those errors don’t concern any obscure corner of law that is of no importance for the American people. Rather, wielding nothing but “raw judicial power,”… the Court usurped the power to address a question of profound moral and social importance that the Constitution unequivocally leaves for the people.
Even “longtime defender of reproductive and women’s rights,” the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed in 2013 that the Roe was flawed:
She would’ve preferred that abortion rights be secured more gradually, in a process that included state legislatures and the courts… Ginsburg also was troubled that the focus on Roe was on a right to privacy, rather than women’s rights.
Problem with RoeIt distorted 14Th Amendment’s right to privacy and expanded it to include abortion. Alito says:
In interpreting what is meant by the Fourteenth Amendment’s reference to ‘liberty,’ we must guard against the natural human tendency to confuse what that Amendment protects with our own ardent views about the liberty that Americans should enjoy. That is why the Court has long been ‘reluctant’ to recognize rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution.
Alito continues to talk about the theory of Life, soundly refuting the dissident opinion signed by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor as well as Elena Kagan.
No view is held as to whether or not prenatal life has any rights that aren’t available after birth. However, the dissent would place on people a specific theory as to when rights of individualhood start. According to the dissent, the Constitution requires the States to regard a fetus as lacking even the most basic human right—to live—at least until an arbitrary point in a pregnancy has passed. Nothing in the Constitution or in our Nation’s legal traditions authorizes the Court to adopt that ‘theory of life.”
He’s rejecting the dissenters’ view that the Constitution regards a fetus as lacking even the most basic right. While he doesn’t specifically say that fetuses have rights, he’s certainly not willing to claim they don’t.
Many left-leaning members of the Left, as well as the dissident justices are alarmed that Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion that his decision called into question cases such old ones like gay marriage or access to contraception.
Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion in Roe v. Wade was a warning about the possibility of other rights being lost. He said that the same reasoning should be applied to rights to contraception, same-sex marriage, and to end them all. https://t.co/tMsDFDqmAI
— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 24, 2022
Alito’s opinion shut the door on revisiting old cases, though, flatly stating that “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”
It’s a powerful opinion, one which is greatly overdue, rights a legal wrong, and hands back power to the states—where it should be. Justice Alito, thank you.
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