Or that the majority of voters should be able to make the determination of when the rights of a person attach to a human life, like the Constitution allowed until Roe took it out of their hands?
Abortion is a fundamental human right. If it can be stripped away from us, so can any right.
The GOP have been champing at the bit to take away all of our freedoms, and now the final barrier holding them back is about to fall. Dark days are ahead.
Actually it’s not clear this is even a majority opinion, some are observing it’s an opinion. Which some Republicans are on board with but there may be a fence sitter, hence the leak.
The leak is real, the opinion is real, the news this is the majority opinion might well be fake.
The right to life is also fundamental. It does not conflict with the right to abortion. In fact, safe, legal abortions save lives; back-alley abortions and coat-hanger abortions destroy them.
The overturning of Roe would almost immediately lead to stricter limits on abortion access in large swaths of the South and Midwest, with about half of the states set to immediately impose broad abortion bans. Any state could still legally allow the procedure.
So, decentralized power to the people. OK.
“The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion,” the draft concludes. “ Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”
So, legal voters will get to legally voice their legal democratic opinions?
“Some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population,” Alito writes. “It is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect. A highly disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses are black.”
Uh huh. Yup. Imagine twenty million more black and brown voters.
Liberal justices seem likely to take issue with Alito’s assertion in the draft opinion that overturning Roe would not jeopardize other rights the courts have grounded in privacy, such as the right to contraception, to engage in private consensual sexual activity and to marry someone of the same sex.
“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.”
So much for the slippery slope.
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.”
So much for the war on women trope.
I will await the tsunami of rhetorical advocacy and red hoods.
And from a personal position, I suspect not a thing will change in NY State wrt abortion.