A collection of commentary on the Supreme Court&#39;s decision to overturn the Roe. v.&nbsp;Wade abortion precedent.

Opinion

Commentary

OPROECOMMENTARY22

Friday's Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization relies on history to rescind the constitutional right to a legal abortion established by Roe v. Wade in 1973. There's just one problem: the history it relies on is not correct. 
 Writing for the majority in Dobbs, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. argues that Roe disrupted &quot;an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment&quot; that had &quot;persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.&quot; But the real picture is far blurrier — and even once states began passing stricter abortion laws between the 1820s and 1880s, public sentiment did not follow. Few abortion providers were convicted under the new laws, indicating that most Americans didn't see abortion as a crime. 
 Anglo-American common law initially guided the U.S. on abortion. Under common law, abortion was only punishable after &quot;quickening,&quot; defined as the moment the mother first felt fetal movement — typically between 16 to 22 weeks of gestation. 
 Alito contends, however, that pre-quickened abortions were always strongly condemned, as shown by the wave of statutes that states passed in the 19th century criminalizing abortion for the entire pregnancy. Yet, over a third of the states actually retained the imprint of quickening in these laws, assigning a distinctly lesser penalty for abortions that took place before quickening. 
 Even more importantly, there is scant evidence of public concern about fetal &quot;personhood&quot; or moral opprobrium prompting those new state laws in the 19th century, as Alito claims in Dobbs. In fact, there appears to have been no public pressure at all for tougher laws before 1845. All the statutes passed before 1845 were added during routine revisions of state criminal codes, probably meaning that most were enacted without actual debate. 
 But then something changed. The number of abortion statutes that states passed shot up between 1845 and the 1860s — and this pattern closely tracked with a sudden groundswell of newspaper reports about young women dead from bungled abortions. A sharp turn in journalistic practices in the 1840s sent reporters chasing crime and sex stories. Abortion was in the news as never before. A collection of 225 newspaper reports about abortion in nationally distributed news articles from 1820 to 1860 shows a trickle of stories up to 1845, followed by a dramatic acceleration thereafter. 
 These highly publicized incidents usually involved the death of an unmarried woman, viewed sympathetically. The newspapers portrayed such women as innocent victims of seduction, desperate to &quot;hide their shame&quot; of illicit premarital sex. Inquest testimony disclosed pathways for abortions: willing doctors, exact addresses, the existence of convalescent boardinghouses and those selling abortion-inducing drugs. 
 Strikingly, these news accounts and inquest records displayed no attention to the fetus beyond establishing gestational age, which in nearly all cases was past quickening. 
 Alito assumes the toughened state laws in the 19th century reflected a strong public disapproval of early-term abortion, and if that were true, we should find a rising number of arrests for early-term abortions. But there are just a handful in the entire set of 225 cases. In two notable examples, a district attorney brought felony charges for abortions after quickening, but the juries came back with pre-quickening misdemeanor convictions. Here, the law's two-part structure actually worked to get defendants lighter sentences. 
 Even as more abortions came to light in the press, most still never made it past the grand jury. For example, in New York City, only 10 cases came to trial in the 1840s. Nationwide, juries in abortion trials often failed to convict. Credible witnesses were scarce and dying declarations were often inadmissible. For the guilty, sentences were months, not years. 
 Abortion law in Massachusetts followed these patterns. Boston had a burst of three court trials in 1844 that received heavy press coverage, and one was a first for that city's newspapers: the arrest of a midwife who successfully terminated the very early pregnancies of three married women. The district attorney allowed that the women were respectable, but he disapproved of their stated motive: &quot;these ladies . . . had children faster than they desired to.&quot; The midwife was acquitted in the State Supreme Court because Massachusetts still followed the common law then, which permitted abortions before quickening. The state legislature quickly moved to change that, and heavily penalized all abortions going forward. Under the new law, 34 cases were tried over the next 12 years. But not a single one resulted in a conviction. 
 Even as states clamped down on abortion, public sentiment failed to keep up. 
 More punitive laws — some mandating sentences of 10 or 20 years — rolled out in the 1860s and 1870s. These resulted from the work of a group of white male doctors in Boston who were convinced that &quot;among the married the crime [of abortion] seems even more common than among those who have the excuse of shame.&quot; They began a concerted drive to stop the practice. Their opening report garnered skepticism, with one critic concluding, these doctors &quot;will fail to convince the public that abortion in the early months is a crime, and a large proportion of the medical profession will tacitly support the popular view of the subject.&quot; 
 Undeterred, the group's leader pulled together a report of &quot;frightful statistics&quot; showing that Massachusetts's increase in population was due solely to immigrants. The native-born population was actually decreasing, the report claimed, which was attributed to married white women having abortions. Pages dense with flawed calculations claimed the abortion rate in Boston was 13 times as great as in New York City, the reputed abortion capital of the country. 
 Via savvy lobbying, the Boston doctors' flawed calculations landed with every legislature in the country. Their arguments persuaded the newly formed American Medical Association, a group also primarily composed of white male doctors with similar concerns, to endorse abortion bans. This advocacy drove most states that had not yet enacted new abortion statutes to do so in the 1860s and 1870s — laws that criminalized abortion before quickening. 
 But a small, elite group of white male doctors leading the charge to criminalize abortion is hardly evidence of widespread support for making abortion illegal. And there is little evidence that criminalizing abortion made a dent in its actual practice. Yet, this is exactly what the Dobbs opinion asserts in seeking to align today's legal framework with an imagined past that Roe allegedly disrupted. 
 Before states began criminalizing abortion in the 19th century, and even after, respectable doctors and midwives performed abortions, with the practice usually only visible to the public when a patient died. Juries were tolerant, penalties were low and successful patients — whether hiding shame or spacing pregnancies — availed themselves of these procedures. 
 None of this supports the idea of an unbroken tradition of preventing abortion and morally condemning it. If anything, history undermines that notion, and only distorting or misunderstanding the historical record allows for such a claim. 
 Patricia Cline Cohen is professor of history, emerita, at University of California, Santa Barbara.

WEBOP2220624

The Dobbs decision looks to history to rescind Roe

Supreme Court Abortion

Freedom and equality have expanded enormously over the course of American history, which makes the ending of a constitutional right virtually unprecedented. 
 In Dobb’s v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court overruled a half-century of decisions protecting a constitutional right of women to choose whether to end their pregnancies. The decision must be understood as entirely about the conservative desire to end abortion rights and not about constitutional principles or judicial methodology. 
 There is a desire to think that law exists apart from the identity and ideology of the justices. But that is a myth when it comes to the Supreme Court. Its decisions always have been and always will be a product of the identity of those on the bench. For example, from the 1890s until 1936, the court had a very conservative majority and declared unconstitutional over 200 federal, state, and local laws protecting workers and consumers. Only once in American history, during the Warren Court, from 1954-1969, and especially from 1962-1969, was there a liberal majority on the high court and its decisions were progressive in a way never otherwise seen in American history. 
 Roe v. Wade was overruled not because of anything about its reasoning or any method of judicial interpretation but because Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 and was able to appoint three justices to fulfill his promise to put on the court individuals who would end abortion rights. 
 These nominees had no compunction about lying during their confirmation hearings and pledging fidelity to precedent, and all have said that Roe is well-established precedent. They knew that once on the bench they could do what they want. Everyone knows that if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016 and picked three justices, Roe would have been safe for decades to come. 
 Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs focuses on the need to leave the issue of abortion to the political process. But there was no deference to the political process earlier this week when the conservatives on the court declared unconstitutional a New York law limiting concealed weapons that had been on the books since 1911 or struck down a Maine law that limited financial aid to religious schools. This conservative court defers to the political process when it agrees with its results, as it does with laws prohibiting abortions, but the deference vanishes when the conservative justices dislike the states laws. 
 Precedent and the principle of stare decisis are supposed to limit judicial discretion and provide stability to the law. But time and again, as in this decision, the conservative justices are willing to overrule the precedents they dislike. 
 They are motivated by carrying out the Republican platform, not a judicial philosophy or an interpretative methodology. The only question is how far they will go. 
 The court’s ruling overturning the constitutional right for abortion is going to unleash a flurry of new state laws restricting reproductive rights. Right-wing politicians who have made abortion their central issue for years are not going to give up on it now that Roe has been overruled. A bill introduced in Missouri would make it a crime for a woman to leave the state for an abortion. States are sure to adopt laws to prohibit forms of contraception that take effect after conception, such as IUDs and the morning after pill. The court’s statements in Dobbs strongly indicates that the conservatives will uphold these laws. 
 Indeed, the court’s approach — saying that constitutional rights should be protected only if they are in the text of the Constitution or part of its original meaning or safeguarded by a long unbroken tradition — puts in jeopardy countless other liberties. 
 Already, conservative litigators have initiated cases to provide the Supreme Court a vehicle for overruling Obergefell v. Hodges, its decision recognizing a constitutional right to marriage equality for gays and lesbians. A majority of the current justices disagree with that decision and they obviously seem unconstrained by precedent. 
 It is unclear what overruling Roe will mean for the court and its legitimacy. A Gallup Poll in fall 2021 revealed the court having its lowest approval ratings in history, 40% approval and 53% disapproval. A new Gallup Poll shows that only 25% of the American people have confidence in the Supreme Court, also a historic low. 
 What will it mean now that it has overruled a constitutional right supported by most Americans? As Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked at oral argument, how will the court survive the “stench” of this purely ideological ruling? 
 This, of course, is not the first time that the court has overruled a major precedent. Most famously, in Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, the court overruled the 58-year-old decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which had upheld laws requiring racial segregation and the doctrine of “separate but equal.” But Brown was a decision expanding equality and freedom and ultimately enhanced the court’s legitimacy. 
 The decision in Dobbs is a pure exercise of power, wielded to reduce freedom and equality — for women specifically. That the conservatives on the court cannot see the difference between Plessy and Roe shows how damaged that institution has become. 
 Every woman of reproductive age in the United States has spent her lifetime possessing a constitutional right that no longer exists. Women with unwanted pregnancies will continue to seek abortions. Some will still get them safely. Some will die or be maimed getting them unsafely. Some will have unwanted children. 
 All of this will happen — not because of any constitutional principle — but because a majority of the justices have decided they have unbridled power to govern the lives of Americans has they choose. 
 Erwin Chemerinsky is dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law and a contributing writer to Opinion. He is the author, most recently, of “Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights.”

WEBOP1220624

Ending Roe is a pure exercise of Republican power, wielded to reduce women's freedom and equality

Ending Roe a pure exercise of Republican power

Newsday Readers

<h2> Who am I to give my spouse permission? </h2> 
 In the 1980s, my husband and I decided that our best birth control would be for him to have a vasectomy. The urologist would only do it if I signed a paper giving him permission. I did, but I was shocked that I could have stopped the procedure by not signing. It was his body, and who was I to have to give permission? 
 Controlling other people's personal choices is a step along the path away from democracy [&quot;Roe v. Wade stirs heated discourse,&quot; Letters, May 22]. His choice has kept me from having to make a choice over any future pregnancies. Our personal choices are our own business. 
 So much for less government interference that the right wing says&nbsp;it wants. 
 Joy Rubenstein, Lake Ronkonkoma 
<h2> NY gas prices are higher than necessary </h2> 
 It's very difficult for the American consumer to not feel ripped off when reading, &quot;Meanwhile, oil producers and refineries have seen profits soar this year&quot; [&quot;Why are LI gas prices so high?&quot; News, May 22]. If the higher gas prices are indeed due to the higher price that the oil companies are paying for crude, their profit margins should have stayed the same, in line with the increased gas prices. Since their profits are soaring, they are clearly profiteering from the increase in the price of crude. This is something Congress should look into instead of taking cheap shots at President Joe Biden. 
 I hoped the average price of $4.97 for a gallon of regular gas on Long Island on Friday was a misprint. On May 12, I left Long Island for North Carolina. I filled my tank in Mastic for $4.19 a gallon, then again in Virginia for $4.16. On May 14, I paid $4.19 in South Carolina. Saturday, I drove back from Florida, where I paid $4.47. Why is New York $4.97? To me, that's price gouging. It&nbsp;should not have increased from $4.16 to $4.97 in one week, especially when the other states have held steady or only had a few cents increase. 
 Barbara Haynes, Hauppauge

Letters

OPLTR220526

Roe v. Wade and gasoline prices

Abortion Mother and Daughters

The first time either of us ever had sex she became pregnant. It was the late 1960s and policy forbade a pregnant girl from attending high school. There was no such policy for the boy —&nbsp;me&nbsp;— who made the girl pregnant. 
 Her parents were devout Christians; mine were devout alcoholics. As teenagers, we had kept secrets from the world, and even from ourselves,&nbsp;but a growing belly was one secret we could not keep. We were pregnant with fear, shame and regret. We decided to figure this out by ourselves, keeping all options open. 
 We quickly ruled out marriage. We were high school students. We had no money or jobs; no one would rent us an apartment. We called the county “welfare office” but couldn’t navigate the system or the shame. 
 We considered abortion. We lived in a Midwestern city with a large university during the “Sexual Revolution.” We decided that it was I who should be the one to walk around a nearby campus, asking young women for information about abortion. We saw posters about ending “coat hanger abortions” but we found no one willing to talk about options to us two baby-faced teenagers about what was then an illegal process. Still, we ruled&nbsp;out abortion, admitting it would never be our choice. 
 The last option was to tell our parents. Her parents were sad and turned to prayer and scripture for guidance. My parents were angry and turned to liquor and lawyers to prepare for a likely paternity suit. 
 We decided she would go to a “home for unwed mothers” and offer the child for adoption. Her mother and father were in the front seat&nbsp;and we were in the back, as we drove to the home. I was alone in the back seat when we returned.&nbsp;We drove endlessly in empty silence. 
 After giving birth, my girlfriend held our daughter&nbsp;once before the adoption. I was not allowed to be there. We were treated kindly all through the pregnancy, but another message was equally clear: Abortion was illegal and sinful, but offering our own child for adoption was the right thing to do after doing the wrong thing. Everything was secretive, anonymous and transactional. 
 My girlfriend returned home with dripping breasts, a flabby tummy and no baby.&nbsp;She was as stunned and empty as I was, and we had no idea how to process what had happened to us. We loved each other very much but drifted apart, forever. 
 Years later, both of us married and had more children. One night, while putting my daughter to bed, I said, “You’re my favorite little girl!” She said, “That’s because I’m your only little girl.” I said nothing. The secret and the shame remained sealed. 
 Twenty-one years after our daughter’s birth, I located my long-lost girlfriend and got her permission&nbsp;to hire a search investigator. A couple of months later, I learned that my daughter’s name was Linda. I wrote a letter to Linda that began, “My name is Dwight Lee Wolter and I vow to never try to contact you again without your approval, but I believe I am your biological father.” 
 She wrote back immediately. At one point, she was living in San Diego. Coincidentally, I was to deliver a speech there on a book I had written about forgiveness. We met and the next day she sat next to me at a banquet table. I was introduced and as I walked to the stage, a woman at the table said to my daughter, 
<blockquote> 
 You must be very proud of your father.” My daughter said, “I am.” The woman then asked, “Has your father been doing this for long?” My daughter answered, “I don’t know, I just met him. 
</blockquote> 
 As I departed for home the next day, she hugged me and softly and tearfully said in my ear, “Thank you for not choosing an abortion.” She never knew, she told me, that I even knew I had a daughter. I was shocked.&nbsp;She also never knew I had carried her in my heart every day for twenty-one years. 
<a class="p-smartembed" data-attr-f="3x2" data-attr-q="0.3" data-attr-w="400" data-onecms-id="contentid/Y2RkZmNlODgtOTFmNC00" data-onecms-type="image" href="javascript:window.parent.actionEventData({$contentId:'contentid/Y2RkZmNlODgtOTFmNC00', $action:'view', $target:'work'})" polopoly:contentid="contentid/Y2RkZmNlODgtOTFmNC00"><img src="/image-service/alias/contentid/Y2RkZmNlODgtOTFmNC00/Wolter.jpg?f=3x2&amp;w=400&amp;q=0.3" /></a> 
 My daughter and I now know much about each other. Her adoptive mother is deceased. Her birth mother has also passed, but not before they were reunited. While he was still alive, her adoptive father was a guest&nbsp;in my home, and he and I worked it out that he would call himself her dad and I would call myself her father. I thanked him and his wife for doing a wonderful job, raising Linda. And I remain immensely grateful that he welcomed my sudden appearance in his life. 
 Linda and I have very different experiences, feelings and beliefs about several things, including abortion. The choice my girlfriend and I once made is obvious. But it was a choice. And like any choice ever made by anyone, it was made in part out of conviction and also of circumstance. It would have been disastrous, for many reasons, if we had chosen to try to raise Linda and we knew it. Shame, stigma, pain, and regret resulted from having “given her away”; the same would have happened if we had chosen abortion. 
<a class="p-smartembed" data-attr-f="3x2" data-attr-q="0.3" data-attr-w="400" data-onecms-id="contentid/MDAzMjYxNTktYTBhMy00" data-onecms-type="image" href="javascript:window.parent.actionEventData({$contentId:'contentid/MDAzMjYxNTktYTBhMy00', $action:'view', $target:'work'})" polopoly:contentid="contentid/MDAzMjYxNTktYTBhMy00"><img src="/image-service/alias/contentid/MDAzMjYxNTktYTBhMy00/Dwight-Wolter-new2.jpg?f=3x2&amp;w=400&amp;q=0.3" /></a> 
 I am now an ordained pastor. I have an opinion about virtually everything. And yet, I remain deeply convinced that it is not my right to violate the sanctity of a woman’s body, to force her to carry her pregnancy to birth or to force her to abort. I may have an opinion as a citizen and a father, but a woman’s choice concerning her own body and pregnancy is not my choice to make. The people, especially the women, in situations like mine from many years ago, are not merely fodder for arguments in churches or the Supreme Court. They are real people trying to navigate very difficult situations. They deserve compassion, mercy, and the freedom to choose.

Guest Essays

OPWOL220522

Adoption or abortion: Our teenage decision

Adoption or abortion: A teen decision

OPWOLTOP

Cathy Young

It looks like Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that legalized abortion nationwide in America, will meet its demise a few months short of its 50th anniversary.&nbsp;A leaked draft of the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has a majority not only upholding a Mississippi law that prohibits abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy but striking down Roe and the very concept of a constitutional right to abortion. 
 It is an anxious and even scary time for pro-choice Americans. But as a supporter of abortion rights (with some qualifications), I think this is a good moment to take stock of how we got here. 
 The Roe saga is fraught with ironies. One is that if Roe — the centerpiece of the feminist legal revolution in America — falls, it will be largely thanks to that revolution’s most admired figure: the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Had Ginsburg retired on Barack Obama’s watch, she would have been replaced by a liberal justice. Yet when some suggested she retire in 2013 and 2014, cries of “sexism!” were the response. 
 Perhaps an even bigger irony is that Roe itself may, in the long run, do more to harm than to help abortion rights. 
 The draft opinion penned by Justice Samuel Alito notes&nbsp;that when Roe was decided, about a third of the states had already liberalized their abortion laws. (New York was one of the first to do so.) Roe, Alito wrote, “abruptly ended that political process” by instituting a right to abortion nationwide. 
 Many abortion rights advocates including Ginsburg herself have acknowledged that Roe was a poorly argued decision without a proper constitutional foundation. Current complaints about the court’s “unelected aristocrats” or judicial tyranny are especially ironic, considering Roe’s detractors have long used similar language. 
 From the pro-choice standpoint, Roe had many positive consequences. Millions of American women gained access to safe and legal abortion, enabling many to stay in school or keep their jobs. But there were negative consequences as well, including the powerful anti-Roe backlash&nbsp;that spurred&nbsp;the rise of a national political movement that included religious conservatives, libertarians angered by judicial overreach, and mainline Republicans. No doubt, a backlash would also have been spurred by state-level pro-choice legislation; but in such a scenario, compromises could have been achieved (such as second-trimester restrictions), especially without the&nbsp;extra impetus from anger at the perceived tyranny of unelected judges in Washington. 
 Because of Roe, the abortion&nbsp;conflict largely played itself out in a tenacious battle for the Supreme Court — undoubtedly contributing&nbsp;to the court’s politicization and undermining&nbsp;faith in its ability to function as a nonpartisan institution. In conservative states, pro-lifers used a variety of strategies to shut down abortion clinics and regulate them out of existence. In some states, abortion access dwindled to a single embattled clinic, and in-state travel to get an abortion was only slightly less daunting than out-of-state travel. Meanwhile, both pro-life and pro-choice activists gravitated toward extreme positions: total bans&nbsp;with no exception for rape or a mother’s health, or abortions up to&nbsp;the day of the birth for ill-defined mental health reasons. 
 In our unpredictable times, it’s hard to say what a post-Roe America will look like. For now, Roe’s undoing by a politicized court is likely to further damage our institutions. Victorious pro-lifers may push for more gains, such as attempts to curb out-of-state abortions. Defeated pro-choicers will invoke the specter of &quot;The Handmaid's Tale&quot; and female sexual servitude. The abortion wars will get worse. 
 Opinions expressed by Cathy Young,&nbsp;a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, are her own.

Columnists

OPYOU220505

The confounding legacy of Roe v. Wade

Supreme Court

6d6f6f868f7d434a99ba012d4b4.jpg

The Editorial Board

Almost 50 years after the Supreme Court ruled that&nbsp;women had a constitutional right to an abortion, a&nbsp;nation struggling to find common ground&nbsp;and keep stable its very institutions of governing is facing yet another major political upheaval. 
 A draft opinion in&nbsp;a lawsuit&nbsp;challenging a Mississippi law prohibiting abortion&nbsp;after 15 weeks of pregnancy reveals that a majority of justices are willing&nbsp;to overturn&nbsp;Roe v. Wade, the&nbsp;landmark 1973 decision which&nbsp;held that states could not ban&nbsp;the procedure before&nbsp;fetal viability. On Tuesday, Chief Justice John G. Roberts acknowledged that a document&nbsp;published by Politico Monday evening was authentic, but that it was not a ruling by the court, nor did it represent the final decision of any justice.&nbsp;Why the early draft by Justice Samuel Alito&nbsp;was leaked is unknown, but it suggests efforts&nbsp;to influence the outcome of the case.&nbsp;Such a&nbsp;breach of trust at the court is a troubling undermining of its legitimacy.&nbsp; 
 At the dawn of Roe, efforts were underway in states such as New York to decriminalize&nbsp;abortions, ending&nbsp;the threat of prosecution for doctors and midwives who performed them and providing women&nbsp;access to safe medical procedures. But there was little national consensus on legalization.&nbsp;The shock of the 7-2 ruling&nbsp;led to the&nbsp;rise of the&nbsp;national Right To Life movement&nbsp;and the start of our debilitating culture wars, as well as the drive to reverse the ruling. Alito's draft reflects the triumph of a&nbsp;conservative legal philosophy that regards cases like&nbsp;Roe as dangerous judicial legislating. This view&nbsp;holds that the right to have an abortion, and whether&nbsp;that right should be balanced against the state's interest in protecting potential life, is a policy preference to be decided at the ballot box. 
 In contrast, a&nbsp;liberal judicial philosophy holds that there is a moral imperative in the Constitution to protect such basic individual liberties&nbsp;and&nbsp;that the Supreme Court should be the guarantor of them. There now seems to be only three justices on the court who firmly take that view. 
 Certainly, the&nbsp;Supreme Court can change&nbsp;precedents.&nbsp;The court has been wrong in the past, especially involving matters of race. But generations of women and their families have relied on Roe to protect their decisions&nbsp;to end a pregnancy. Polling through the years shows steady majority support for Roe and opposition to it being overturned. A&nbsp;Washington Post-ABC News survey in late April&nbsp;found that respondents by a 2-1 margin said Roe should be upheld. If Alito's draft stands,&nbsp;access to abortion will determined by where you live&nbsp;and by your financial ability to travel to a state where the procedure is legal. 
 A radical Supreme Court decision&nbsp;in 1973 that established&nbsp;a constitutional right to terminate&nbsp;a pregnancy&nbsp;likely will be undone by a radical decision&nbsp;that such a right no longer exists. All that is certain is that the abortion wars will continue.

Editorials

VPROE220504

A Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade won't stop the abortion wars

Reversing Roe won't stop fight

<h2> </h2> 
 My heart is sick over the callousness of conservative justices who would force a 13-year-old girl impregnated by rape to carry that baby full-term [“Supreme Court overturns Roe; abortion bans allowed,” News, June 25]. 
 What about a pregnant woman whose life is at risk while carrying a baby? And what about a fetus that dies and that woman is denied an abortion? Republicans are willing to force women to carry unwanted babies but are unwilling to provide counseling or other support for these mothers and their unwanted babies after they are born. 
 A baby born into an unloving environment faces a difficult life. How sad. How infuriating that Republicans want less government in general but more government when it comes to controlling women’s bodies. This is a tragedy in the making. 
 &nbsp;— Rhonda Weintraub, Kings Park 
  &nbsp; 
 To think my fellow Americans feel it is right to push their religious beliefs on the rest of us is heartbreaking. And a life sentence to millions of women who, for whatever reason, seek to end a pregnancy. Now, are the Republicans going to increase services for these women and children (who are being forced to be born) to keep them above poverty level? We all know the answer is a loud “No!” 
 I am too old for overturning Roe v. Wade to affect me personally. But I will always fight for my daughters’ and granddaughters’ right to choose. 
 &nbsp;— Michelle Urso, West Babylon 
  &nbsp; 
 Finally, “liberty and justice for all” — born and unborn. Now, it’s up to the states and voters to get it on the ballots in November and let democracy do its job. Isn’t that what democracy is supposed to be? The federal government never should have been involved. The Constitution is not about taking lives away by choice. 
 &nbsp;— Bernie McGrath, Holbrook &nbsp; 
 Now that the Supreme Court has abridged the federal right to privacy, it says it is time to return the issue of abortion “to the people and their elected representatives,” i.e., the states. 
 The opinion, addressing past state laws outlawing abortion, says these laws were “spurred by a sincere belief that abortion kills a human being.” The opinion then allowed, “One may disagree with this belief.” This “belief” is nothing other than a religious judgment, in many cases embodied in a given religion’s sacred texts. 
 The court has given the states free reign to impose religious beliefs of some Americans (according to all polls, a minority) upon all the people who happen to live in a given state. Imposing the religious “beliefs” of some on all is in direct violation of the First Amendment. 
 &nbsp;— Carl Grasso, Huntington 
  &nbsp; 
 Shame on the Supreme Court justices! Our entire country has never been more divided in my 71 years, yet these justices have overturned a most controversial precedent. This highest court in our government is supposed to be comprised of apolitical judges whose only agenda is to determine the constitutionality of federal laws. 
 Instead, many of them are choosing to support conservative platforms and, more blatantly, they have chosen to do this before midterm elections. 
 In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution protects a woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion, and the court reaffirmed this in 1992. Has the wording of the 14th Amendment, giving the fundamental right to privacy protecting the choices a woman makes, been changed? No. 
 &nbsp;— JoAnn Saladino, Amityville 
  &nbsp; 
 I was pleased with the ruling. It wasn’t banned throughout the country but was left up to the states to decide. I don’t know why President Joe Biden says this is overturning Constitutional rights since there is nothing in the Constitution that guarantees abortion. 
 There are many ways to prevent getting pregnant, and women who don’t want to be pregnant should use these preventive measures. &nbsp; 
 — Wayne Mortak, West Babylon 
  &nbsp; 
 Now, the hypocrisy of the Republican Party is fully on display. You can apply for a gun permit for no reason at all, and you no longer have the right to choose the kind of health care you receive. 
 You will be able to carry a concealed weapon on a crowded Long Island street, and you might just use it to kill someone. That seems fine with the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. But if you’re a woman and you’re raped, you will not have the right to abort a possible pregnancy. 
 Murder is both a moral and legal issue, but to make it easier to carry out is a travesty in and of itself. Abortion is strictly a moral issue that should never have legal connotation assigned to it. 
 How long before contraception or family planning is criminalized while “he insulted me, so I shot him” becomes justifiable homicide? Hypocrisy! 
 — &nbsp;Michael Zisner, Bethpage 
  &nbsp; 
 One thing that seems left out of the discussion is what goes on before you become pregnant. How about self-control or birth control? Sixteen-year-old girls who are protesting in front of the Supreme Court justices’ homes should focus on not getting pregnant. 
 You can take control of your body and not get pregnant. “My body” is heard over and over. It is women’s responsibility not to get pregnant. You have the keys to the kingdom. Once you have sex, you should start the clock to address how you will deal with the issue if you become pregnant, and not wait. Maybe take a pregnancy test before your next menstrual period, and not wait until a heartbeat is present. And a baby could always be given up for adoption. 
 Protesters younger than 50 should remember that their parents chose not to abort them. 
 — Kevin McGrath, Northport 
 What will be next up on the table, repealing a woman’s right to vote? Sadly and truly, this is all the fault of former President Donald Trump. America is now the disgrace of the world. 
 — Michael Lefkowitz,&nbsp;&nbsp;East Meadow 
  &nbsp; 
 If Justice Clarence Thomas’ interpretation of the Constitution is based on original intent, how do he and other justices of the Supreme Court reconcile their gun rulings with the fact that, when our Constitution was written, there only existed single-shot pistols and single-shot rifles that were loaded, quite slowly, with a ball, wad and gunpowder? Assault rifles and even today’s pistols could not have been envisioned. &nbsp;— Ralph Kreitzman, Great Neck 
  &nbsp; 
 Such a sad time for our country — treating women like second-class citizens. 
 Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurring opinion, wrote about outlawing contraception and same-sex marriage. He should be reminded that interracial marriage has only been legal since 1967. Is he considering making that illegal, too? 
 — Barbara Meyer, Melville 
  &nbsp; 
 I saw Paul McCartney in concert this month. When he sang, “When all the broken-hearted people living in the world agree, there will be an answer,” it resonated with me more than it had the past 50 years. 
 I started thinking of the increasing number of broken-hearted Americans worried about the frequency of mass murders with little gun control, open-carry gun laws, the imminent threat of global warming and, now, the loss of the right for women to control their bodies. And the sad acknowledgment that these are just some of the issues that have been made worse by the Republican Party. 
 — Ray Boivie, Kings Park

OPLTR220627

Roe decision brings out emotions

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The Supreme Court overturned 50 years of legal precedent and quickly cut off legal access to abortions for women in large parts of the country Friday. Many big corporations realized quickly that they had to respond to the sweeping decision. 
 In the days before the widely anticipated announcement, some of the nation’s largest employers reached out to their workforce, offering support for those who are directly affected. After the publicized leak in early May of a draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito arguing for a reversal of Roe v. Wade, corporate boards and CEOs knew they had to consider their options. 
 The nation’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, told workers that it will pay for travel to states that allow legal abortions. Amazon will cover costs for employees seeking abortions in states where the procedure were made illegal. CVS, Apple, Meta, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Disney also issued statements that attempted to reassure anxious workers. 
 “We recognize people feel passionately about this topic — and that there are teammates and athletes who will not agree with this decision,” Dick’s CEO Lauren Hobart wrote.The court’s explosive decision and the emotional debate that followed are the latest of many recent controversies where corporations were under pressure to take a stand. 
 Gone are the days when businesses could solely focus on their core business model — keeping customers, winning new ones and making a profit. 
 “There is one and only one social responsibility of business,” Milton Friedman famously wrote more than 50 years ago — ironically around the time of the Roe decision. The Nobel Prize-winning economist said that a corporation should “use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” 
 But now we live in very different times. Pursuing shareholder value alone is not enough. Many of the most highly valued young workers expect their employers to reflect their values. Businesses also face greater scrutiny from consumers. Brands feel required to be socially and politically relevant. 
 “It’s just no longer an option for businesses to hide on the sidelines on all issues,” says entrepreneur and market research executive Diane Hessan, author of the recent book “Our Common Ground.” “This is the time when businesses feel obligated to have some sense of social responsibility because their customers and partners want them to, and their employees want them to. In many cases they are the last bastions of where we have trust.” 
 But speaking out on polarizing issues can carry real risks. Examples of corporate stumbles include Disney’s shifting stand on Florida’s “don’t say gay” legislation barring instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines angered conservatives when they criticized Georgia’s law to tighten regulations on voter access. Both Atlanta-based companies faced pressure from Black employees and others to come out against the Georgia law. 
 “Companies are on the receiving end of a lot of criticism,” says Elizabeth Doty, director of the Erb Institute’s Corporate Political Responsibility Taskforce at the University of Michigan. “We felt they needed a place to get foresight to dig into what’s behind these complaints.” 
 The task force was formed to help companies manage risks and concerns related to their corporate political activities. 
 “Companies need to go from trying to navigate this minefield to be consistent with themselves, investing in systems for healthier debate,” Doty told me during a recent interview for our podcast, “How Do We Fix It?” 
 Citing the voting rights example, she said that one successful approach for corporate leaders could be to ask “what makes for a trustworthy election system and then fund a cross-partisan process to go in and do that.” 
 This process-driven approach to finding common ground and boosting civic engagement may be an opportunity both for corporate leaders and the Bridge Alliance movement. 
 “Most people trust businesses more than government or news organizations,” says Hessan. “Business does have a huge opportunity.” 
 Doty agrees. “Companies at a minimum can invest in healthier public discourse,” she says. “In the right conditions people can come together.” By setting ground rules for honest conversations among employees from different backgrounds and viewpoints, corporations can create a more positive workplace environment and start the enormous task healing rigid political divisions. 
 Richard Davies is a podcast consultant, host and solutions journalist at daviescontent.com. The Fulcrum is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news platform covering efforts to fix our governing systems. It is a project of, but editorially independent from, Issue One.

WEBOP2220628

After Roe v. Wade ruling, businesses face tough choices

Businesses face tough choices after Roe v. Wade ruling

Supreme Court Abortion Kentucky

The moment many Americans dreaded&nbsp;and many others fervently hoped for — the fall of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion — is here. Everyone agrees that the high court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson to strike down the 50-year-old precedent by a 5-4 vote will transform American politics, culture and society in ways we cannot yet predict. 
 One can certainly criticize the ruling’s logic, as well as the political maneuvering that allowed conservatives to gain their majority on the high court. But the fact of Roe’s demise remains. In a country where most people have a moderate position on abortion, endorsing its legality in some but not all cases, can a compromise be found that reduces the damage to the body politic? 
 Yes, but it’s very unlikely in today’s political environment. 
 One thing Republican and conservative leaders could do to lower the temperature of the abortion wars is clearly state their commitment to federalism — which would preclude attempts to impose a nationwide abortion ban, either by congressional mandate or by another Supreme Court case. This would not only show consistency (since so many conservatives have stressed the fact that Roe took away the ability of states to legislate on abortion) but remove the prospect of an anti-abortion regime being imposed in states where the population is strongly pro-choice. 
 Conservatives could also endorse the position, stated by Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his concurrent opinion in Dobbs, that women’s ability to seek abortions in other states is protected by the constitutional right to interstate travel. And they can discourage local officials from embarking on crusades to curb the use of the abortion pill — efforts that would inevitably lead to truly un-American intrusions into private behavior. 
 Lastly, conservatives should take an unequivocal position in favor of abortion ban exceptions for rape&nbsp;and incest&nbsp;and for health emergencies. There are already reports of hospitals in states with strict abortion bans being reluctant to perform surgery for ectopic pregnancies. Pro-life politicians must take a strong stand on this problem. 
 Democrats and progressive activists could compromise as well. They could agree to accept a federalist solution as long as no attempts are made to enact a national ban, giving up on efforts to codify Roe nationwide. Private charity networks and assistance from pro-choice states can help defray the costs of travel for low-income women from states with abortion bans. 
 Democrats could also make peace with state abortion bans after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for health emergencies — the kind of restrictions enacted in Mississippi, Florida, and most recently Virginia. Such bans are widely supported by pro-choice Americans. Late abortions with no medical necessity are a major driver of anti-abortion sentiment. 
 Lastly, Democrats and progressives could agree to tone down the catastrophist rhetoric — for instance, about thousands of deaths from back-alley abortions. This may have been the case in the 1930s,&nbsp;but in the year before the Roe&nbsp;decision, 39 women in the United States died from illegal abortions and 24 from legal ones. 
 Unfortunately, the reality is that neither side is likely to accept such compromise solutions — at least, not the politicians or the activists. The culture wars are much too profitable, both politically and financially, and so polarizing politics will continue — at least until more American voters start to reward moderation and compromise. 
 Opinions expressed by Cathy Young,&nbsp;a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, are her own.

OPYOU220630

Ways polarized U.S. can compromise in post-Roe v. Wade reality

Can we compromise after Roe v. Wade?

Abortion

If Supreme Court justices had to run for reelection, a number of them would be in big trouble. Last week the court issued radical decisions that boldly defied American opinion on both abortion and guns. It overturned Roe v. Wade and about 20 other cases that had protected the right to abortion for a half-century. And in the wake of some of the worst mass shootings in American history, it struck down a New York law dating to 1911 that required people to demonstrate a need before being authorized to carry a gun in public. 
 But Supreme Court justices have their jobs for life. We can’t send them packing (short of impeachment, which is limited to high crimes and misdemeanors). What, then, can those of us who feel violated by the court’s raw exercise of power do? 
 In both the abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and the gun case, New York State Rifle &amp; Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court is out of step with the nation. Polls consistently show a large majority of Americans favored upholding Roe, and more than three quarters of New Yorkers supported that state’s limits on carrying guns. 
 If you are angry, you should be. But how should we respond? 
 Amending the Constitution is so difficult that it’s virtually impossible. Some have urged the appointment of additional justices to alter the court’s ideological alignment. The Constitution does not specify how many justices must be on the court, and the number has varied over time from five to 10, so nothing in the Constitution stops the appointment of more justices. 
 But that’s both unrealistic and a bad idea. The only president even to propose such a move was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in response to a Supreme Court that was striking down New Deal legislation. But even though FDR was one of the most powerful presidents of all time, and the court at the time was exceedingly unpopular, the American people never supported his plan. (The court eventually shifted its approach, however, and started upholding the New Deal laws, perhaps in response to FDR’s threat.) 
 If FDR could not muster political support to expand the court at the height of the Great Depression, when New Deal laws were widely viewed as essential, what chance would President Joe Biden have? 
 Packing the court is also a bad idea in principle. It would invite tit-for-tat responses whenever either party gained control of the political branches. That would do nothing to depoliticize the court, and would probably make it more partisan than it already is. 
 But that doesn’t mean we are without options. History shows that when the court departs from where the people stand on fundamental issues, a popular reaction generally leads to a correction. Thus, the New Deal-era court began upholding laws protecting workers and consumers. Such adjustments can go both ways. Popular criticism of the expansion of criminal defendants’ rights in the 1960s, including the right to remain silent and to exclude illegally seized evidence from court, led the court, regrettably, to weaken those rights in the following decades. 
 The court is not immune to the world around it. Consider the anti-abortion movement’s response to Roe v. Wade. They didn’t accept the decision as the last word. For 50 years, they organized, voted and lobbied to ban abortion — and last week, they prevailed. But just as Roe wasn’t the end of the story, nor is Dobbs. All who care about ensuring women’s right to be equal citizens with control over their bodies should take a page from anti-abortion activists — and mobilize. 
 Support state legislative and constitutional initiatives to protect the right to abortion. Contribute to funds to help women travel to states where abortion remains lawful. Press the federal government to make medication abortion as widely available as possible and to pay for it. And file lawsuits in state courts invoking state constitutions to provide the protection that, for now, the federal Constitution does not afford. 
 On guns, too, there remains much we can do. Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John G. Roberts wrote separately in Bruen to explain that states can impose gun requirements as long as they place limits on licensing officials’ discretion. For decades, the principal obstacle to gun control was not the Supreme Court, but politicians beholden to the National Rifle Association The politics of guns may well be changing, and active engagement with gun-control organizations can speed that along. 
 The Supreme Court is an anomaly in a democracy: an institution with great power that is not directly accountable to the people. There are good reasons for its insulation from ordinary politics. We call on it to defend rights of the most vulnerable and least politically powerful. But when it fails to do so, we need not accept its decisions as ending the debate. 
 Most important, we must elect politicians who believe in the right to abortion and the need for reasonable gun control — and then hold them to it. The best way to respond to decisions like Dobbs and Bruen is to use our civil liberties to defend the values we hold most dear. 
 David Cole is national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

WEBOP1220629

The Supreme Court is not accountable to the people. What can check its power?

What can check the Supreme Court's power?

Supreme Court Redistricting Louisiana

There are virtually no precedents in American law in which a right — declared fundamental by the Supreme Court — was erased. While the court has overhauled constitutional protections before, the complete retraction of the right to abortion sets the nation on a course it has never seen. 
 From 1910 to 1937, the court recognized a right to freedom of contract, but this rarely functioned as a liberty for workers — often, the court used this “right” to strike down laws protecting workers. And in the 1970s, four years after ruling that the death penalty as applied in the U.S. was unconstitutional, the court reinstated capital punishment after states revised their laws to meet the court’s requirements, leading to the executions of more than 1,500 people in the decades since. 
 But the court has never so clearly recognized a constitutional right and then simply wiped it away. 
 That this right belongs to women is no accident. The court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization says almost nothing about equality for pregnant people — Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s majority opinion rejects arguments about abortion and sex equality in a single paragraph. It hints that striking down the right to abortion will be unpopular, and perhaps dangerously so. But the conservative justices made it quite clear that it is not their job to worry about what the public thinks. If most Americans did not want this to happen, the court quite simply does not care. 
 We often think of courts as expanding rights — such as protection from racial discrimination in public schools in 1954, or the right to use contraception in 1965, or marriage equality in 2015. It might be no surprise that when we think of the protection of rights, we tend to think of courts. 
 But the rise and fall of Roe tells a more complicated story about where our rights come from, and what we can do to defend them. 
 Historically, the Supreme Court has almost never acted in a vacuum. The decisions we attribute to the court, good or bad, have come in the middle of broader social movement mobilizations, with strategies that unfolded not just in the courts but in the legislatures and on the streets. 
 There would never have been a Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark school desegregation decision, without the civil rights movement. Arguably, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which sought to root out workplace discrimination, set out rights as fundamental as the one protected in Brown. 
 There never would have been a Roe v. Wade without the women’s movement and the broader abortion-rights movement that it helped to fuel. Feminists held speak outs and told deeply personal stories about abortion; people marched and lobbied state legislatures. Doctors chafed under laws that they already disobeyed. 
 In his majority opinion in Roe, Justice Harry Blackmun points to this social upheaval and suggests that the court’s reasoning — in articulating a constitutional right — rose above the political fray and might settle broader conflicts about abortion. 
 Blackmun’s view of rights, one centered on the court, has had tremendous power, but this court-centric view was never the complete story. 
 The view of Roe the public knows best now — one centered on women’s rights — was not articulated by the Supreme Court in 1973. At that time, the justices focused as much on the rights of doctors as on the rights of women. Feminists promoted a different interpretation of Roe, one based on self-determination for patients, that caught on with the public, with politicians, and with the court. 
 When the court preserved abortion rights in the 1992 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the court’s majority and the dissenters almost certainly responded to decades of battles about abortion by trying to balance the interests of pregnant people in autonomy and equality against the government’s interest in protecting fetal life. 
 And Dobbs itself was not the work of the Supreme Court alone — there has been half a century of work by the antiabortion movement to change the Republican Party, rework the way campaign spending works, and make sure that a different kind of justice was nominated to the Supreme Court — one who was more conservative, more ideologically committed, and less afraid of controversy. 
 The court tells us that Roe short-circuited our fight about abortion rights because the justices themselves wanted to have the final word. Quoting the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Alito writes that Roe “fanned into life an issue that has inflamed our national politics in general, and has obscured with its smoke the selection of Justices to this Court in particular, ever since.” Many will accuse this increasingly unpopular court of doing the same thing. But the reality is that our rights have never just come from the court, and that won’t change now. 
 Whether people in America can access abortion will not depend on six conservative justices. It will depend on the support progressive states provide, the ingenuity of people who support abortion access, and the ability of conservative states to shut down those avenues. 
 Whether there is a right to abortion, too, will depend on all of us — whether there is a progressive movement large and committed enough to match what conservatives have accomplished in changing a political party and the court. And whether that movement is operating in a country democratic enough to respond to popular will. 
 For decades, polls have shown that a majority of Americans did not want abortion rights to be eliminated. Now, we will see what they are willing to do about it. 
 Mary Ziegler is a professor at the UC Davis School of Law and the author, most recently, of “Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment.”

WEBOP1220628

How to move forward after the destruction of Roe v. Wade

Opinions on Supreme Court's landmark abortion ruling in Roe v. Wade overturn

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Opinions on Roe v. Wade overturn

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