Supreme Court and abortion

[ken_sylvania]

It seems that perhaps Judge Jackson was following the instructions found in Proverbs 26:5....

Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.

[Ken]

What are those multiple legal definitions? Perhaps she could have landed on just one of them by way of example.

Just to cite two conflicting examples:

International sports competition uses a testosterone-based standard. So, for example, female athletes with Hyperandrogenism (naturally-elevated testosterone levels) cannot compete as women despite having female genitalia and having been designated as female at birth on their birth certificates, and having XX chromosomes. And even that standard changes depending on the event and sport in question.

By contrast, I believe the military treats birth certificates as definitive and does not examine genetics or testosterone levels. And Title IX uses yet a different definition.

So there are individuals who might meet one legal definition of a woman but not a different one. The job of a judge is to interpret the law, not make it. That is the role of the legislature and executive branch. And there are, indeed multiple different definitions depending on the context and statute in question. So Judge Brown Jackson was correct to decline to answer what was not a sincere question. Senator Blackburn could have followed up with a more nuanced question addressing an actual point of law. That would have been easy to do. For example, the Obama Administration and the Trump Administration had conflicting guidance on this topic as it applied to LGBT students and Title IX compliance. Senator Blackburn could have asked her opinion on that and I expect the answer might have been interesting. But she chose not to.

What definition of "woman" does Title X use?

It doesn't. Not in the statute itself. However different administrations have produced different guidance for how it should be implemented with respect to LGBT students and athletes. So it is not actually a settled point of law. And it is actually a question that could potentially come up before the Supreme Court.

That is why I said that Judge Brown Jackson's answer to that sort of specific question might have been interesting. But that isn't what was asked. And Senator Blackburn didn't follow up with any sort of specificity.

[temporal1]

So what is your view of people who’s sex does not conform to simple binary biological definitions.
Are they abominations who should be exterminated? That was the Nazi view.
Are they all part of God’s creation and deserving of respect despite not fitting into binary definitions of sex?
Are they examples of God’s mistakes? And therefore should be pigeoned-holed into societal or religious-based categories into which they may not fit?

They deserve respect and kindness, the same as any other human being.
Are they part of God's creation? Yes all mankind, the animal kingdom, nature etc. is God's creation. So what about the question whether God made a mistake when someone turns out to be non-bianry. We live in a fallen world, which was Man's doing, not God's. For that reason we have all kinds of aspects that are far from God's perfect plan for mankind. We have terrible sicknesses, we have terrible wars, famines, earthquakes, pandemics, and yes non-binary people. But let it never be said that, those things are God's mistakes. Those things came about because we live in a fallen world.

The predictable leap: you don’t recite and celebrate my view, you’re a Nazi. Will they ever tire?
Laws should apply to all. Murder is criminal and a sin. All should expect to be protected by this one law.

This is an interesting video, not directly related, but it addresses differing philosophical approaches to problem solving.
Doc Rich reacts to Thomas Sowell/Trevor Noah (Equal opportunities versus equal outcomes)



Gov needs to step ‘way back from attempting to be “smarter than God.”

[Ernie]

It looks like the US Supreme Court is poised to do away with Roe vs. Wade.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/0 ... n-00029473

[temporal1]

It looks like the US Supreme Court is poised to do away with Roe vs. Wade.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/0 ... n-00029473

98 pages. Fascinating, and heart-stopping.
But, “here we go again?” with OPINION pieces??

i suspect this will be fought by politicians+media with more vigor than Ukraine. and Zelensky will be certain to notice.

NYT: The Morning / David Leonhardt / more opinion:

Good morning. Roe v. Wade seems to be on the cusp of falling.

Protesters at the Supreme Court last night.Kenny Holston for The New York Times
A Supreme leak
The Supreme Court has decided to overturn Roe v. Wade and allow states to outlaw abortion, according to a written draft of the justices’ decision obtained by Politico.

Other publications have not confirmed the authenticity of the draft, and Supreme Court justices sometimes change their minds during the writing of opinions. But many legal observers are treating the draft as authentic and assuming that abortion policy in the U.S. is about to be transformed.

Among the reasons:
The tone and style of the draft match those of earlier court decisions.
The outcome also matches an outcome that seemed plausible based on the justices’ questions during arguments in December.
After Politico published its story last night, the Supreme Court declined to comment.

If the court overturns Roe, many conservative states would likely outlaw nearly all abortions. One estimate suggests that the numbers abortions in the U.S. would decline by about 14 percent, The Times’s Claire Cain Miller and Margot Sanger-Katz explain.

Today’s newsletter walks through the case and its implications.

The vote
Every Republican appointee on the court other than Chief Justice John Roberts has voted to overturn Roe, Politico reported: Samuel Alito (who wrote the draft), Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas. The three Democratic appointees will evidently dissent. Roberts had not made up his mind at the time of the draft’s writing, but his vote is not crucial.

The biggest caveat is that justices sometimes change their minds, while they are reading and circulating draft opinions among themselves. In 2012, for example, Roberts changed his stance on whether to overturn Obamacare, as CNN’s Joan Biskupic later reported.

But such a switch seems unlikely now. Because of the leaked draft — a leak with no modern precedent at the court — any justice who switched sides would become notorious as the conservative who saved Roe.

This Times story reviews the competing theories about who leaked the draft.
Some observers think it might have been a conservative justice or clerk, to lock in the majority. Others think it might have been a liberal justice or clerk, to undermine the court’s reputation as a high-minded body above the partisan fray; the leak makes the court look more like other Washington institutions.

The arguments
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Alito writes in the draft. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

The draft says that the Constitution is silent about abortion and that nothing in its text or structure supports a right to abortion.
Roe, the draft continues, is so egregiously wrong that it does not deserve to be retained as a precedent;
the proper approach is to return the question to the states.

The draft’s assertive and sometimes slashing tone reads very much like other major opinions from Alito, The Times’s Michael Shear and Adam Liptak note.

Politico apparently did not obtain a draft of the dissent.
But during oral arguments, the liberal justices argued that such a radical change coming so soon after a change in the court’s membership would undermine its claims of nonpartisanship.

“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked. “If people actually believe that it’s all political, how will we survive?”

How we got here
Roe has been law for almost 50 years, and Democrats — who almost universally support it — have won five of the past eight presidential elections. How, then, did an anti-Roe Supreme Court majority happen?

Circumstance plays a role. Donald Trump was able to appoint three justices, because of retirement or death — the most appointments in a single term in decades. But two specific decisions also loom over the potential repeal of Roe:

In 2016, after Justice Antonin Scalia died, Mitch McConnell and other Senate Republicans refused to allow Barack Obama to appoint a replace during his final year in office. It was an aggressive power grab with little precedent, and it worked, after Trump won that year’s election.
In 2013 and 2014, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg decided not to retire, even though Obama could have appointed her replacement and Democrats controlled the Senate. She was enjoying her job as a justice, and she ignored pleas from other progressives, who specifically warned that she could be threatening abortion access.

Barrett now occupies Ginsburg’s old seat, and Gorsuch occupies Scalia’s. Without both of those votes, Roe would probably not fall. During oral arguments, Roberts appeared to prefer a compromise that would have allowed states to ban abortion at 15 weeks; such a decision would have outlawed only a small percentage of abortions.

The politics
Public opinion on abortion is complicated. Most Americans support at least some access to abortion, and most support at least some restrictions. (A previous edition of The Morning goes through the details.)

If Roe falls, the U.S. would likely be split between blue states with greater access to abortion than most Americans favor and red states with substantially less access than most Americans favor.

Many Democrats have long believed that the politics of abortion help the party during elections —
and that a court decision overturning Roe could help them retain Congress this year. That seems conceivable but hardly assured.
It does seem like the country is about to find out.

Commentary
Jill Filipovic, Substack: “I thought this decision would have a lighter touch, that the Court would functionally overturn Roe without formally overturning Roe. I underestimated their radicalism.”
Dahlia Lithwick, Slate: “The results will be catastrophic for women … particularly for young women, poor women, and Black and brown women who will not have the time, resources, or ability to travel out of state.”
David French, The Dispatch: “If the Alito opinion is real, it represents a restoration, not a rupture of our constitutional fabric … Roe was the rupture, and our nation has been dealing with the legal and political consequences ever since.”

For more
Here’s a look at abortion laws that Republican state legislators have recently proposed.
An earlier Times story looked at who gets abortions in the U.S.
The Times’s Adeel Hassan looked at the Mississippi abortion law challenging Roe.

hmm. so the DNC has specifically exploited abortion as an edge in elections, while criticizing conservative voters for being “single-issue” voters, as if this were a terrible thing.
no surprises.

i guess that exlains (my) puzzlement that obama+hrc would both openly state DNC party support for for-profit corporate abortion.
they didn’t “have” to be so bold. they calculated votes and went all-in for division. then roundly criticized voters that disagreed.

this is a heart-stopper (so to speak.)

in my view, the great need for young people to be taught they have CHOICES BEFORE CONCEPTION that prevent extermination of human life (for profit) - AND that those choices greatly improve their own lives in the process. VALUE LIFE. your own, included.

young people need+deserve to be empowered to THINK.
this includes THINKING about pregnancy BEFORE conception, thinking about RESPONSIBILITIES of parenting - about the roles, rights+responsibilities+privilieges esp of FATHERS. THINK IT THROUGH.

if only so many opposed to abortion had not been convinced to vote for it/its expansion+funding, this might be a non-issue.
however, they were convinced this was a lesser matter and went ahead to vote for it. denying that’s what they did.

of course, it’s not a single issue, but accusations+propaganda are powerful in mob mentality.

[joshuabgood]

It looks like the US Supreme Court is poised to do away with Roe vs. Wade.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/0 ... n-00029473

I did not really expect to live to see the day that this happened. If it goes forward, it is exciting to think that perhaps "abortion rights" will land on the ash heap of history similar to chattel slavery.

And if it happens, I do think the Supreme Court justices chosen by Donald Trump, and skillfully politically pushed through by Mitch McConnell are the reason. And for that, I am grateful for Donald Trump's choices, especially, Barret and Gorsuch. I don't know who else (besides Trump and McConnell) would have had the tenacity and brashness to push this through.

[Grace]

It looks like the US Supreme Court is poised to do away with Roe vs. Wade.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/0 ... n-00029473

Overturning Roe v. Wade would give the power back to the states and the people, and not the nine unelected justices whose purpose is to make sure our laws are Constitutional. I predict every state, will allow it, but set the amount of weeks of gestation before abortion is illegal. Except for very liberal states such as New York and California, where abortion might be legal up until right before the baby is born.

I do find it ironic that the same people talking about a woman’s right to choose to kill their babies, couldn’t define what a ‘woman’ was, a couple of weeks ago.

[temporal1]

It looks like the US Supreme Court is poised to do away with Roe vs. Wade.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/0 ... n-00029473

The article ends with:

.. “We emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right,” Alito writes.
“Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”

Alito’s draft opinion rejects the idea that abortion bans reflect the subjugation of women in American society.
“Women are not without electoral or political power,” he writes. “The percentage of women who register to vote and cast ballots is consistently higher than the percentage of men who do so.”

The Supreme Court remains one of Washington’s most secretive institutions,
priding itself on protecting the confidentiality of its internal deliberations.

“At the Supreme Court, those who know don’t talk, and those who talk don’t know,” Ginsburg was fond of saying.

That tight-lipped reputation has eroded somewhat in recent decades due to a series of books by law clerks, law professors and investigative journalists. Some of these authors clearly had access to draft opinions such as the one obtained by POLITICO,
but their books emerged well after the cases in question were resolved.

The justices held their final arguments of the current term on Wednesday.
The court has set a series of sessions over the next two months to release rulings in its still-unresolved cases,
including the Mississippi abortion case.

This report/“leak” is very political, and intended to be political. 2 months of media haggling over it, for sure.
i agree with Ginsberg’s quote. ^^^

[temporal1]

It looks like the US Supreme Court is poised to do away with Roe vs. Wade.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/0 ... n-00029473

Overturning Roe v. Wade would give the power back to the states and the people, and not the nine unelected justices whose purpose is to make sure our laws are Constitutional. I predict every state, will allow it, but set the amount of weeks of gestation before abortion is illegal. Except for very liberal states such as New York and California, where abortion might be legal up until right before the baby is born.

I do find it ironic that the same people talking about a woman’s right to choose to kill their babies, couldn’t define what a ‘woman’ was, a couple of weeks ago.

The very liberal states tease infanticide, i believe Virginia/Gov Northam was discussed on this forum. (2019?)

There is some talk of protections for infants who are accidentally born alive in botched abortions.

Definitely, some states, like mine, Illinois, have gone all-in to become centers for the abortion INDUSTRY, investing in strategically locating clinics at state borders, black urban areas, advertising, covering support in gov schools, healthcare, et al. Big business. $$$$

You are probably correct about states including exceptions (that will be exploited to the greatest extent possible).
The drive to exterminate innocent human life may be without comparison. For profit, of course. [DIY is deemed evil.]

Even the NYT predicts ONLY 14% reduction in abortions!! But how they FIGHT: Every unborn deserves the right to be executed!
For corporate profits. [Again, no DIY. That’s evil.]

To repeat, pregnant children+teens are NOT women.
The public should not accept this horrifying “blurring” of medical, legal, everyday language that has the potential to do untold harm to children+teens. and their families.

[temporal1]

It looks like the US Supreme Court is poised to do away with Roe vs. Wade.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/0 ... n-00029473

I did not really expect to live to see the day that this happened.
If it goes forward, it is exciting to think that perhaps "abortion rights" will land on the ash heap of history similar to chattel slavery.

And if it happens, I do think the Supreme Court justices chosen by Donald Trump, and skillfully politically pushed through by Mitch McConnell are the reason. And for that, I am grateful for Donald Trump's choices, especially, Barret and Gorsuch. I don't know who else (besides Trump and McConnell) would have had the tenacity and brashness to push this through.

It hasn’t happened yet. 2 months out.
At this time, prayers for the health+safety of the judges. The stakes are high, emotions fuel bad decisions.

For the relatively small change that would result, politicians+media will work overtime to instill fear+exploit - FOR VOTES.