What would be the political consequences of a SCOTUS decision in Dodd to overturn or modify Roe?
Democrats backing abortion rights predict a “revolution” of outraged voters ousting anti-abortion Republicans in elections for state legislatures and Congress. At least some Republicans are nervous about such a backlash…
Today, the leading pro-abortion rights constituency is white college graduates, especially women (as have been most college grads these past 25 or 30 years). Many will probably be enraged by an overturning of Roe. But the potential for partisan upheaval is limited because over the past 50 years, views on abortion have increasingly followed party lines.
Affluent college graduates since the mid-1990s have trended Democratic, increasingly so since Donald Trump rode down his escalator in 2015. As a result, most of those who might be moved to retaliate against anti-abortion Republicans have been voting Democratic for years. They may be especially motivated to vote, but affluent college grads are already the most reliable turnout demographic.
You can expect abortion-rights activists to stoke fears that a reversal of Roe will criminalize abortion in all 50 states. Of course, serious Democrats know better. In states like New York, politicians have been pushing laws that declare abortions legal until the moment of birth. Overturning Roe simply means that states decide.
…Even states like Texas, whose recent abortion ban controversially authorizes enforcement by citizen lawsuits, are unlikely to ban abortion altogether. And the large majority of current abortions, as abortion-rights supporters often point out, occur before Mississippi’s 15-week time limit. Total abortion bans are likely to be passed only in states where almost no legal abortions are performed already or in the anti-abortion territory of Guam. The lion’s share of abortions currently legal will remain legal.
I do think striking Roe would improve Dems chances in November. And I think much of what Barone says it is accurate. I personally dislike the new Texas law, and preferred the previous 20-week law as it was (the one that was approved over Wendy Davis filibuster attempt). I think many more people agree with the 20-week concept than either end of the abortion spectrum. And I also think Barone is right that getting rid of Roe simply returns the issue to the states.
More importantly, I’m tired either way of Abortion affecting our political landscape. I get the issues on both sides. The fact is, there are more important issues that need resolution and that is apparent in polling of all issues. Yet Abortion seems to be a big political driver, while not being that important to most voters.
Abortion is one of those things that I know intellectually, is wrong. For reasons I won’t belabor here.
However it is also one of those things I only “feel” is wrong when I contemplate it in relation to people for whom I have some liking, respect, or sense of identification.
To some degree, with regard to the others, it just seems like human arseholes with garbage values committing a kind of lineage suicide. Shrug. Of course that take is not completely accurate. College graduate white progressive women who only live to preen, interfere with and annoy though government everyone within arm’s reach their daily and economic lives , still manage to have some children … and thereby reproduce more toxic annoyances like themselves.
And then there is the fetus. When you despise the parent and would be content to see it do to itself whatever it would regardless of the outcome, the tendency is to forget about it.
And too, to forget about the extended social ramifications of sharing a sociopolitical space with human vipers and moral nihilists inhabiting female skin sheaths.
Yeah, there is more than one aspect of all this to consider. And for good or ill, the reasoning part of it all seems to me to point in one direction, whether I truly like it or not.
Barone is probably right that those most driven by pro-abortion feelings are already voting Democrat, and also that leftist-leaning states will promptly enact broad protections for abortion, if they don’t have them already, like New York.
It is truly remarkable that a stone-cold requirement to be a Democrat is to be an abortionist in principle, if not in practice.
Democrats have killed over 60 million unborn infants since Roe. That is more lives taken than either Mao’s or Stalin’s in their entire tenures.
And there are the lies which disguise their motives: the very young cannot feel pain, and abortions are necessary to protect the life of the woman.
CDC says 700 women total die yearly during pregnancy. Seven hundred!
I have no issue with overturning Roe and letting the 50 states each decide. That is federalism at its best.
Keep Roe, dump the social standard of viability, and set an objective viability standard at the beginning of life to match the end of life: the first and last heart beat, a coherent and entropic nervous system.
There is no mystery in sex and conception. A woman and man have four choices: abstention, prevention, adoption, and compassion, and a right to self-defense through reconciliation. The wicked solution is neither an exclusive nor good choice. The Pro-Choice “ethical” religion denies women and men’s dignity and agency, and reduces human life to a politically congruent commodity.
A human life should not be aborted for social, redistributive, and fair weather causes.
Keep Roe, dump the social standard of viability, and set an objective viability standard at the beginning of life to match the end of life: the first and last heart beat, a coherent and entropic nervous system.
Why keep Roe? It’s utter nonsense.
Junk Roe completely, admit the whole basis for the decision was hooey, and admit the jurisdiction of Congress extends only to the armed services, possessions outside the borders of the states, and service contracts between parties separated by a state line. General police power belongs to the states. The inclusion of provisions on abortion in the penal code is at the discretion of state legislatures.
In a just society, it would be illegal with scant exception.
Today, the leading pro-abortion rights constituency is white college graduates, especially women (as have been most college grads these past 25 or 30 years). Many will probably be enraged by an overturning of Roe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCqEqZOSxjI
The Democrats are welcome to this specimen.
There is no viable legal basis for SCOTUS not overturning Roe. If it enrages those on the left, so be it. Right action is not dependent upon not offending those who support murder. Meet their rage with scorn.
Even supporters of abortion reveal that in their heart of hearts, they too see it as murder. If they welcome the pregnancy, it’s a baby with public congratulations to the happy couple.
But if not, it’s no more than a piece of trash to be thrown out with the garbage. At best it’s cognitive dysfunction, at worst evil selfishness. Exceptions: early abortion for rape, up to viability for discovery of incest and the health of the mother.
“The fact is, there are more important issues that need resolution and that is apparent in polling of all issues.” Leland
A consensus of opinion does not necessarily equate to correctness. Especially when the taking of an innocent life consistently rates highest on criminality.
So what issue is more important than the murder of 60+ million babies?
Don’t be surprised if the Court rules strictly on the question before it of whether the Mississippi law violates the Constitution. I am betting that they will rule it does not as 15 weeks in which to abort the fetus is “not unduly burdensome” regarding the right to abortion. They will thus avoid the politically charged issue of abortion per se.
stu;
That’s what I think, too. In a previous post I predicted that.
The fact is, there are more important issues that need resolution
There may be more acutely pressing issues. There are no issues more important.
stu,
I agree that is the most likely course the court will take.
I also agree with stu but agree that Roe v Wade has distorted politics for two generations.
And if they have a “ revolution” , the LIVs would only be shown the most sanitized version , just as they were with the uber destructive BLM riots. It makes me furious how much the LIVs were bamboozled by “ mostly peaceful protest” when in fact thousands of businesses were targeted, numerous buildings burnt to the ground, numerous people killed , numerous people , and their automobiles, assaulted by protestors, and numerous persons claimed they were in fact engaging in revolution.
January 6 was a trespassing event compared to the actual attempt at revolution in the summer of 2020.
From n.n. “There is no mystery in sex and conception. A woman and man have four choices: abstention, prevention, adoption, and compassion, and a right to self-defense through reconciliation.”
I agree with this statement.. the only exception would be for a girl who is too young to understand sex, or a sexual attack has occurred and an abortion may be the best option for her.
I often wonder what the impact of multiple abortions on the future ability to have children – surely multiple abortions as a means of birth control has to have a very bad result. Either there is an impact on the health of the reproductive organs to be able to bear an additional child or there is a psychological impact on the mother after repeated abortions.
My opinion is that we are a constitutional republic and so the decision is up to the state. If I live in a state that does not allow an abortion on demand, then I need to move to a state that does allow it if I consider abortion to be the primary means of contraception.
I am reminded of a series of debates I had with a friend of a friend on Facebook, before I deactivated my account. He was one of those leftist men who defended abortion as a women’s rights thing.
When the conversation came up about that Canadian Woman who was in a WOMEN’S shelter being told she had to share a room with a biologically intact male, and threatened with prosecution for complaining, the liberal “women’s rights” guy made some comment about her wanting to be in the room with a male. Mr. abortion rights for women had absolutely no sympathy for the woman fleeing abuse being forced to share a room with a man.
I’ll tell you the practical consequences. The Left will picket and protest outside the homes of Justices who didn’t vote to affirm Roe and Casey. This will go on 24/7. ACB’s minor kids will be harassed at school. Same for Kavanaugh. The Left today has a Brownshirt army and it will be deployed. Mark my words.
“The Left today has a brownshirt army.”
Yes, that is the essence of neo-Nazism.
Cornhead:
Yes, but would that end up mattering politically?
“Yes, but would that end up mattering politically?”
You’d best hope so. Some drunks have indeed found their keys under lamp posts.
But most drunks had to get back into their lodgings By Other Means.
Neo:
It would intimidate SCOTUS Justices on future cases and certainly intimidate both state and federal legislators on future laws.
The left assumes that they will have free reign to riot. Kenosha may say otherwise.
Cornhead:
I don’t think it would intimidate them any more than they are already intimidated, which is considerably.
Art Deco at 6:28 pm : Exactly.
Cicero: “CDC says 700 women total die yearly during pregnancy. Seven hundred!”.
Is that like Covid deaths? Died of cancer with Covid?
Viability has nothing to do with the wrongness of Roe.
As much as I abhor the murder, that is not the reason to overturn.
Roe is a mockery of jurisprudence and the Constitution.
There is no “right to privacy” in the sense of Roe.
LOL Given that male fertility or motility has been reported as dropping by half, then if true [not saying it necessarily is] I wonder what impact if any, birth control pill runoff in water supplies might be having. We are assured, according to a flood of more recent papers since the issue first gained notoriety in the early 2000s, that it is none.
Less than 1 percent of the relevant estrogen in the water supply can be traced, we are recently assured, to birth control pills. The rest is due to plastics, and fertilizer and animal waste run off. So don’t worry youngsters because you don’t even need the levels men had back in 1970 when there were no industrial chemicals to be found in the western world’s water supply.
A danger to fish maybe. And that is a concern. Now with regard to fish in Scandinavia, they are saying that birth control pill run-off is causing genetic deformities in fish. But not to worry. Can’t hurt, you.
And in your case, it’s not from pills anyway. And it doesn’t really matter if you become less fertile, or infertile. What’s fertility anyway? Who knows?
Just as long as Sassy and Moron can disport themselves as they please, and when they please, without ever thinking about it, all will be good. The blue haired land whale and her tattooed infertile cuck … sex partner … banging away at each other in sterile futility. As awful as an aesthetic concept it might be, it does have a moral symmetry to it that is undeniable.
Well, glad I came to sexual maturity, if just barely, before this race of Cucks and their nihilist Femme masters proceeded forth from their mother’s – eh birthing persons’ – wombs.
If from a womb it was.
Mistaken perceptions about the end of Roe are so widespread that I would not be surprised if any backlash against overturning it fizzles once folks understand that abortion will still be legal in most places.
Turning the frogs gay.
That’s old news, turning the pre teens and teens trans, that’s not anything in the water, or in those precious bodily fluids. That’s the real power of mass hysteria. Where’s the fainting couch?
If the Court votes to revert the Roe subversion, the Court is finished and they know it.
As quickly as they can force it through congress Biden, Pelosi, and Warren will stuff the Court with as many far left injustices as they can find to ensure it’ll never do anything out of line again…
They’ll win the elections anyway, unless the container ships with the prefilled ballots are stuck at sea because the ports are unable to offload them in time.
About 3% of fetuses 20 weeks of gestation survive (with a lot of work by neonatal ICUs). You can’t have 20 week mothers going into premature labor and producing a surviving fetus and then deciding to kill the child (say, because of trisomy 21 or 18), because then the OB/GYNers in charge have to leave the child unattended in a cool place in L&D and let it die from exposure. This is seen and felt by all to be immoral behavior. Sometimes these fetuses are sent to the morgue to die in the morgue reefer. To avoid this they now give digitalis intra-amniotically before the completion of the delivery. This also is seen as rather gross immoral activity. You have to have laws that prevent abortions occurring so late in gestation that the fetus is viable. RvW allows abortions up to the end of the second trimester. 26 weeks. Dumb. Not smart. SCOTUS made a big error here. European laws usually specify @end-of-first trimester and there has been no political turmoil for decades in these jurisdictions.
What is the effect on the pro life people? Don’t prolife Democrats vote for Democrats because Republicans are procieved as too weak and useless on abortion?
This is a cultural issue that has been stuck in wedge issue hell. Honestly a far assessment is Democrats want to be able to abort post birth babies and Republicans don’t want any abortion. The gray area has been erroded and the stark contrast is how the issue is debated.
Arguments like this make me think of analysist talking about how bad the woke are with their cancel culture, division and hate politics only to point out things will be worse when the converstives respond in force. The argument always seems to reinforce that conservative are “dangerous” or too far when it’s the “woke” and Marxists who errode and destroy the structure.
Spare me the hand wringing. Oh no, don’t live up to your values because those people might have some advantage. Come on. The Dems are sinking because people are getting their Carter 3.0 plus Johnson 5.0 and even this cultural issue doesn’t change the failure of the government.
Whichever side loses, this test of Roe will affect the November elections, I think. A loss for the pro-abortion side will enrage them and motivate them to turn out, whereas now they are dispirited by the Biden failure to even present a plausible front. If they win, it will be soon forgotten and their malaise will help the GOP in the turnout contest.
The suburban moms who were critical in winning the Virginia 2021 races will similarly be pushed back into the Democrat camp by a judicial blow against abortion rights from a block of GOP-appointed judges. Just when they are becoming fed up with the Democrats’ dishonesty, arrogance, and anti-Americanism, the battle-cry will become the threat of “The Handmaid’s Tale” made real.
But upholding Roe by striking down either of the laws at issue will hurt the GOP as well. There is a defeatist core of “what’s the use?” losers, waiting to point to yet another loss and proclaim that there’s no point in fighting, conservatives should just stay home and let the GOP die. Many are Independents, others have been barely retained by the party due to Trump and his anti-GOP Establishment message.
So either way Republicans are going to be hurt by this result. Energized Democrats and moderate moms will be ready to seek revenge against “the patriarchy” if Roe is even curtailed. If Roe is upheld the air is going to go out of the fair number of Trumpist Republicans who hate their party.
Responding to some of the above comments.
https://jonathanturley.org/2022/01/01/inappropriate-political-influence-chief-justice-john-roberts-responds-to-threats-against-the-court/
Roberts says, somewhat obliquely, that the Justices will not put up with blatant intimidation.
“Decisional independence is essential to due process, promoting impartial decision-making, free from political or other extraneous influence. The Judiciary’s power to manage its internal affairs insulates courts from inappropriate political influence and is crucial to preserving public trust in its work as a separate and co-equal branch of government.”
We’ll see.
@ jon baker > “Mr. abortion rights for women had absolutely no sympathy for the woman fleeing abuse being forced to share a room with a man.”
The epitome of adding insult to injury.
https://notthebee.com/article/trans-prisoners-switch-genders-again-once-released-womens-units
@ DNW > “To some degree, with regard to the others, it just seems like human arseholes with garbage values committing a kind of lineage suicide.”
Steven Hayward at Powerline thinks it’s a great idea.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/12/loose-ends-146.php
“I’m having trouble seeing the downside here. Seems to me a lot of liberal pajama-boys would be doing the world a big favor by making this a trend:”
Possible source of the news headline he highlighted:
https://www.lifenews.com/2021/12/27/liberal-men-are-getting-vasectomies-to-protest-the-texas-abortion-ban/
Another relevant story from that site:
https://www.lifenews.com/2022/01/04/supreme-court-can-overturn-roe-v-wade-just-like-it-overturned-dred-scott/
They list a good number of appropriate reversals, but Dred Scott was not one of them, apparently.
“The 13th and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution formally overturned Dred Scott.”
Still, it’s been clear for centuries that most people (Democrats, predominantly) support stare decisis when they approve of the decision, and condemn it when they don’t.
NOTE to NEO: for some reason, when I click your link, I get this post by Barone:
https://www.creators.com/read/michael-barone
“Plague-Year Immigrants Headed to Trump Country”
It’s a round-up of news stories, but does not include the one you excerpted.
I did find it here:
https://jewishworldreview.com/michael/barone120321.php
I liked his conclusion:
“One interesting fact about the 49-year Roe regime is that abortion has become less, not more, common. The abortion rate per number of women in childbearing years peaked in 1980 (41 years ago!) and the absolute number of abortions peaked in 1990, even though the nation’s population has increased since by one-third from 250 million to 330 million.
For many women of a certain age, the “choice” issue has been a proxy for all the choices they’ve made in their lives, contrary to expectations with which they were brought up. But for younger Americans, abortion may be less the wave of the future than a relic of the past.“
So, if most pro-abortion advocates are white colege-grads, doesn’t that make them racist white supremacists in the progressive playbook?
Once left to the states, New York and California and Virginia others will go crazy, with as few limits as possible.
Women and girls of rape are truly victims. However allowing abortion then may compound the injury. Where’s the research on that? Planned Parenthood, do any follow up research? Do you make sure the check cashed before starting the procedure?
I don’t think it would intimidate them any more than they are already intimidated, which is considerably.
We saw this after the 2020 election.
Milwaukee – Nothing prevents NY, VA, CA and the like from going crazy now, and many of them have. Roe only prevents limits on abortion. The only change I could see from deep blue states post-Roe is that I suspect a few of them will pass constitutional amendments encoding Roe.
Another interesting thing to watch would be the state Supreme Courts in states like KS and PA that have judiciaries that are to the left of their voters. The KS Supreme Court has already made its own “mini-Roe” decision based on the eminations and penumbras of the KS state constitution. I suspect that at least a few others will do the same. It will be interesting to see how voters respond to that. It’s usually easier to change state constitutions than it is to amend the Federal, but it is still difficult.
Kansas appellate judges face retention-in-office referenda. Kick ’em out.
On what basis is a women’s choice to hold a rite for her baby denied in the second and third trimesters? The fourth trimester? The Pro-Choice religion is a many ethical philosophy.
The “handmaid’s tale” was a handmade tale, one of a diverse collection, conceived and birthed to support a political myth and a cover-up of social progress and collateral damage. Wasn’t Roe a trans/homosexual female abused/raped on repeated occasions? Something similar happened with a mass trans/homosexual male rapist, a tale not fit for braying, apparently, which was summarily sequestered with an apology socially justified through an allusion to divisiveness (i.e. transphobia).
That said, what difference does it now make? The Nazi’s diverity, inequity, and exclusion regime. Hitler’s abortion chambers. Mengele’s clinical cannibalism. Forward! Planned parent/hood, too, in therapeutics (not non-sterilizing vaccines) denied, delayed, and mistreated a la New York, Michigan, New Jersey.
Hysteria to pack the Supreme Court could hurt the Dems more than than the uproar over the end of Roe.
Wasn’t Roe a trans/homosexual female abused/raped on repeated occasions?
Norma McCorvey took up lesbianism after 1973. She was quite hopeless in her early years and there was a comical interlude during the whole Roe case when Sarah Weddington was frantically attempting to locate her ‘client’. She and the other dame made a passable living running a housekeeping service, eventually able to afford medical insurance.
McCorvey was doing well when she was appended to one person and earning a living at a low-skill activity. She was rather miscast as a public figure and should have been left in peace to live the best life she could with the sense she had. Weddington exploited her. I suspect others did as well, just without Weddington’s malevolent intentions.
Weddington died a couple of weeks back. She was childless, spent the last 47 years of her life unmarried, and will forever be known as the instigator of something truly awful.