CT Blue

Yesterday we learned (no need to link, everyone knows about it by now) that the Supreme Court is planning to reverse Roe v. Wade. It’s actually a bit of a surprise to me, as I expected that they would simply gradually chip away at it until it was all but overruled, but never expressly so.

Before I go on, a hat tip to the person who leaked the draft opinion, since there can be no question but that we would not otherwise have learned about this until after the election, which is when those judges who insist the court is absolutely non-partisan, would have released it, lest they hurt Republican chances in the mid terms.

I imagine I won’t be the first to make the following predictions, but I’ve purposely avoided reading commentary on the decision until after I post this, so I can honestly say these were my initial thoughts, unprovoked by pundits of the right or left.

I think the future course of American law on reproductive issues is an “and/or” proposition. The right will agitate for, and the court will, unless the Democrats get their act together:

1. Overrule Griswold v. Connecticut, and leave it to the states whether women can have access to birth control. We’ve already seen the beginning of this movement among politicians cultivating the Trumpists. And no, I will not digress into an irrelevant discourse about the probability that Trump himself has likely paid for a good number of abortions as well as encouraging his sex partners to use birth control. Oh, wait I did digress. Anyway, whatever rationale the court is using to overrule Roe (I haven’t read the opinion) will of necessity also provide support for overruling Griswold. Needless to say, such a decision would not be particularly popular with the majority of people in this country, but the court is, in other areas, doing its best to make sure the will of the majority has no bearing on who gets elected or what laws get enacted. So, that’s one thing we’ll be hearing about.
2. The other half of the “and/or” will require some pretzel logic by the court, as I do know, despite having not read it, that the draft opinion states that the question of abortion should be left to the states. The problem is that some states will not only opt to keep it legal, they will likely make it easy for out of staters to obtain abortions. And, of course, from the point of view of the anti-abortion establishment, every sperm is sacred, so allowing any abortions at all cannot be tolerated. So, we’ll see lawsuits brought seeking to nullify the right to abortion in such states by declaring a fetus a person from the moment of conception, and all abortions murder. This will require some fancy footwork on the part of Amy and her pals, as there would be all kinds of precedents they’d have to ignore, but don’t put it past them.

Life is full of ironies. We likely wouldn’t be faced with this possible future if Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a fierce defender of abortion rights, had done the right thing and retired while Obama had a Senate majority.

It is to be hoped that the Democrats can, at least, capitalize on this development by making it a part of their campaign, not only be attacking the reversal of Roe, but by warning that the soon the Republicans will be coming after your birth control pills. They say they will, but we’ll see.

UPDATE: Having now gotten my predictions out, I have perused my preferred sources of punditry. Here’s a good accounting of the horrors to which we can now look forward.