Roe v Wade has been overturned. How do you feel about that?

[Eldy]

While overturning Roe still appears to be the likeliest outcome, I think this leak, from what we were told explicitly were conservative sources, tells us is that's it's not quite a done deal. One or more of Trump's conservative justices is yet considering signing on to Justice Roberts' compromise, and the conservatives are using media leaks to try and pressure them to stand fast with Alito's hardline plan.

That's also my take on the motivation for this (and the previous) leak.

[RoseMorninStar]

In the US there is no Universal health care. Even if one has decent employer sponsored health care, deductibles are often high (many don't kick in until you have spent $6,000-8,000 out-of-pocket). Many women of child bearing age work part time jobs (sometimes several) which don't offer health care at all (the 'part time' is intentional in this aspect). The US does not have paid mandatory maternity leave nor is there adequate child care - and child care is VERY expensive. The US doesn't have guarantees for mothers that their job will be held when they leave to have a baby. The cost of maternity care and delivery varies greatly from state to state, but costs for an uncomplicated vaginal delivery easily ranges from $7,000 to $20,000, not to mention the loss of income during recovery. If people/our government were truly 'pro-life' and pro-family, this needs to change. Many people simply cannot financially afford to have child after child. This does not even begin to touch on housing needs, or mental, physical burdens or the care of other children and family members.

[N.E. Brigand]

There were protests outside the homes of some Supreme Court justices this evening.

I tend to feel generally that it's inappropriate to protest at people's homes, even those of government officials (key exception: the White House). Like all of us, they're entitled to privacy. But I struggle to reconcile my inclination with these points:

1. Any woman who seeks an abortion -- or many other medical services available at clinics where abortions are provided -- already has to run a gauntlet of protesters when she's engaged in a personal act.

2. The justices in question are expected to invade the privacy of probably millions of women in a far worse way than they are experiencing tonight.

Edited to add: Regardless of the moral question, protesting at people's homes is almost certainly counterproductive to the protesters' aims and likely to bolster sympathy for the justices whose homes they're at.

I think it's critical to distinguish between elected officials and judges. Elected officials have the discretion to vote for or against anything allowed by the Constitution or their state constitution. Judges must interpret the law. In reality, the Supreme Court is politicised and nothing will change that now. But I hate the idea of a court being pushed by public opinion. The right people to protest against are state legislators who pass laws on abortion and the governors who sign them.

If the US Supreme Court upholds a state gun control law (unlikely given its current composition) we'll end up with mobs with AR-15s at Justice Sotomayor's and Kagan's houses. This really isn't a good path to go down.

Thinking more about this hypothetical: If the US Supreme Court upholds a state gun control law (unlikely given its current composition) we'll end up with mobs with AR-15s at Justice Sotomayor's and Kagan's houses. This really isn't a good path to go down.

The "side" who would march at Kagan's and Sotomayor's houses has already gone down that path by bombing abortion clinics and even the Olympics, haven't they?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Today I learned that in 1994, the Supreme Court, in an opinion authored by Chief Justice Rehnquist, ruled against the part of a federal law requiring 300 ft. buffer zones for protesters gathering at the homes of doctors who provide abortion services. The Court did uphold the central portion of the law, which said that a 36 ft. buffer zone around clinics who provide abortions was constitutional, and the Court said that if the law had provided for buffer zones of that size around doctors' homes, that too would be constitutional.

Justice Thomas (and former Justice Kennedy) joined the forceful dissent of Justice Scalia, in which he said the law infringed up on the First Amendment (which he said was "in grave peril" based on that decision) and that no buffer zones should be permitted.

I think we could apply the case logic to the homes of public figures, including the Supreme Court members: protesters have to stay 36 feet away from their houses (as long as all protesters at abide by the same requirement).

Except there should be no buffer zone around Justice Thomas's house, as per his own wish.

(On strategic grounds, it's still probably a bad idea. It certainly seems unlikely to convince the justices to change their minds.)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Senator Susan Collins, Republic of Maine, who claims to support abortion rights, voted in 2017 and 2018 to confirm two justices now expected to overturn Roe. On Saturday, Collins filed a police report after someone wrote "Susie, please, Mainers want WHPA --> vote yes, clean up your mess" in chalk on the sidewalk in front of Collins's home (WHPA = Women's Health Protection Act). In a statement, Collins referred to this as "defacement of public property," but it wasn't initially clear who specifically called the cops. Then the Bangor police department provided journalists with the official report, then followed up to indicate that they should have redacted the name of the person who actually made the complaint -- Senator Collins herself (and the report also indicates that Collins's husband saw the chalk earlier in the day but didn't do anything about it) -- and asked the reporters not to report that information because although "the people involved are public figures, they still have (some) right to privacy."

It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.

Anyway, I did a quick search online, and I think I've identified the perpetrators:



Lock them up! Or maybe: Roast 'em alive, or stew them in a pot; fry them, boil them and eat them hot?

[N.E. Brigand]

Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, who has in the past said that life begins at conception, said today that if/when Roe is overturned, even if abortion is outlawed in his state, his constituents needn't worry because it will surely remain legal just a short drive away in Illinois.

[N.E. Brigand]

Curiously, while Roe v. Wade was the subject of some controversy from the beginning, it didn't really become a flashpoint until about 1980. The Southern Baptist Convention in 1971 called for abortion to be permitted "under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother." And some evangelical leaders in 1973 praised the decision in Roe, saying that it would give poorer families a tool they could use to plan for their future. There appears to have been no discussion in 1975, when the first Supreme Court vacancy since Roe came up, about Republican President Ford naming a candidate who opposed abortion, and there were no questions about abortion or Roe in the Senate confirmation for the nominee, John Paul Stevens.

More on the history from Seth Cotlar, a professor at Willamette University, whose observations start with this:

"Barry Goldwater’s wife, Peggy, was a founding member of Planned Parenthood in Arizona. George H.W. Bush, as a Republican Congressman from Houston, spoke so frequently on the House floor about family planning that he was tagged with the nickname 'rubbers.'"

And Planned Parenthood was advocating for abortion by the mid-1950s.

I was struck by the polling Cotlar cites which shows that 76% of Americans favored allowing abortions in all or some circumstances in 1975, whereas 80% of Americans hold that position now (with 21% in 1975 and 19% in 2022 opposing abortion in all circumstances). That's not much change. What changed more is that in 1975, only 22% favored allowing abortions in all circumstances, and support for that position is at 32% now.

This essay in the San Francisco Chronicle has more information about how positions on abortion changed since 1972, when 68% of Republicans and 59% of Democrats agreed with the statement that "the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician" (and as late as 1976, the Republican Party platform took no position on abortion). The article repeats some other writers in saying that abortion was a cover story for opposition to integration: during the Carter administration, the IRS began to enforce a provision that would remove non-profit status from segregated universities and so the Christian right, unable to publicly oppose integration, settled on abortion as a cause to be used to oppose Carter and by extension Democrats.

But here, Rick Perlstein, the author of Reaganland, says that's false because most Christian schools were no longer segregationist in the late 1970s and that opposition to abortion was actually a cover story for some loony right-wing theories about homosexuality and secular humanism (not so different from what we're seeing now in Florida, for example).

In either case, I'm just not sure how the substitution is actually supposed to have operated in people's minds.

[Eldy]

In either case, I'm just not sure how the substitution is actually supposed to have operated in people's minds.

From the Politico article Perlstein disagrees with:

If he could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal behind conservative causes.

“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited. “The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”

But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to rally.

It's not so much that abortion was substituted for segregation (or anything else) in individual people's minds as that abortion became the flagship issue through which to recruit people into the new religious conservative movement. Even if some of these people never moved on to caring about other agenda items, being single-issue voters on abortion who only ever support arch-conservative candidates would still result in candidates who support the broader agenda being elected to office. In fact, it was a smarter strategic decision to not speak (much) in public about issues like the tax status of segregation academies, because that ran the risk of alienating some members of the new anti-abortion coalition. In contemporary slang, we call these the quiet and loud parts (i.e., "saying the quiet part loud" refers to someone who fails to be discreet about their less socially acceptable motivations).

[RoseMorninStar]

Senator Ron Johnson has said so many stupid and foolish things one cannot possibly keep on top of it. Recently said it 'may be true' that COVID vaccines give people AIDs.

US News & World report: Social Programs Weak in Many States With Tough Abortion Laws

States with some of the nation’s strictest abortion laws are also some of the hardest places to have and raise a healthy child, especially for the poor.

Also:
From CNN politics: Life can be tough for kids in many anti-abortion states

What does this suggest? Such laws are not so much about being 'pro-life' or concern for the life of the child (once it's out of the womb) or concern for the mother (which is also a life). It's pro-xygote/pro-fetus, and I'll add, a means of control. Political control and control of a woman's autonomy, privacy, & freedom. If people are truly pro-life, pro ALL life, that is wonderful. Then let's see that carry through in their actions, support, and pocketbooks for ALL life and not just this pro-fetus hypocrisy.

[elengil]

Interesting snip of history:

Benjamin Franklin gave instructions on at-home abortions in a book in the 1700s

Okay I am trying to link to the article and it keeps embedding the listen thingy... this is an article on NPR...

[RoseMorninStar]

Fascinating.

[RoseMorninStar]

The Atlantic had a good thought provoking article.
There's a Better Way to Debate Abortion
Caution and epistemic humility can guide our approach.
By Peter Wehner

I'll quote it here.

If Justice Samuel Alito’s draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization becomes law, we will enter a post–Roe v. Wade world in which the laws governing abortion will be legislatively decided in 50 states.

In the short term, at least, the abortion debate will become even more inflamed than it has been. Overturning Roe, after all, would be a profound change not just in the law but in many people’s lives, shattering the assumption of millions of Americans that they have a constitutional right to an abortion.

This doesn’t mean Roe was correct. For the reasons Alito lays out, I believe that Roe was a terribly misguided decision, and that a wiser course would have been for the issue of abortion to have been given a democratic outlet, allowing even the losers “the satisfaction of a fair hearing and an honest fight,” in the words of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Instead, for nearly half a century, Roe has been the law of the land. But even those who would welcome its undoing should acknowledge that its reversal could convulse the nation.

If we are going to debate abortion in every state, given how fractured and angry America is today, we need caution and epistemic humility to guide our approach.

We can start by acknowledging the inescapable ambiguities in this staggeringly complicated moral question. No matter one’s position on abortion, each of us should recognize that those who hold views different from our own have some valid points, and that the positions we embrace raise complicated issues. That realization alone should lead us to engage in this debate with a little more tolerance and a bit less certitude.

Many of those on the pro-life side exhibit a gap between the rhetoric they employ and the conclusions they actually seem to draw. In the 1990s, I had an exchange, via fax, with a pro-life thinker. During our dialogue, I pressed him on what he believed, morally speaking, should be the legal penalty for a woman who has an abortion and a doctor who performs one.

My point was a simple one: If he believed, as he claimed, that an abortion even moments after conception is the killing of an innocent child—that the fetus, from the instant of conception, is a human being deserving of all the moral and political rights granted to your neighbor next door—then the act ought to be treated, if not as murder, at least as manslaughter. Surely, given what my interlocutor considered to be the gravity of the offense, fining the doctor and taking no action against the mother would be morally incongruent. He was understandably uncomfortable with this line of questioning, unwilling to go to the places his premises led. When it comes to abortion, few people are.

Humane pro-life advocates respond that while an abortion is the taking of a human life, the woman having the abortion has been misled by our degraded culture into denying the humanity of the child. She is a victim of misinformation; she can’t be held accountable for what she doesn’t know. I’m not unsympathetic to this argument, but I think it ultimately falls short. In other contexts, insisting that people who committed atrocities because they truly believed the people against whom they were committing atrocities were less than human should be let off the hook doesn’t carry the day. I’m struggling to understand why it would in this context.

There are other complicating matters. For example, about half of all fertilized eggs are aborted spontaneously—that is, result in miscarriage—usually before the woman knows she is pregnant. Focus on the Family, an influential Christian ministry, is emphatic: “Human life begins at fertilization.” Does this mean that when a fertilized egg is spontaneously aborted, it is comparable—biologically, morally, ethically, or in any other way—to when a 2-year-old child dies? If not, why not? There’s also the matter of those who are pro-life and contend that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being but allow for exceptions in the case of rape or incest. That is an understandable impulse but I don’t think it’s a logically sustainable one.

The pro-choice side, for its part, seldom focuses on late-term abortions. Let’s grant that late-term abortions are very rare. But the question remains: Is there any point during gestation when pro-choice advocates would say “slow down” or “stop”—and if so, on what grounds? Or do they believe, in principle, that aborting a child up to the point of delivery is a defensible and justifiable act; that an abortion procedure is, ethically speaking, the same as removing an appendix? If not, are those who are pro-choice willing to say, as do most Americans, that the procedure gets more ethically problematic the further along in a pregnancy?


Plenty of people who consider themselves pro-choice have over the years put on their refrigerator door sonograms of the baby they are expecting. That tells us something. So does biology. The human embryo is a human organism, with the genetic makeup of a human being. “The argument, in which thoughtful people differ, is about the moral significance and hence the proper legal status of life in its early stages,” as the columnist George Will put it.

These are not “gotcha questions”; they are ones I have struggled with for as long as I’ve thought through where I stand on abortion, and I’ve tried to remain open to corrections in my thinking. I’m not comfortable with those who are unwilling to grant any concessions to the other side or acknowledge difficulties inherent in their own position. But I’m not comfortable with my own position, either—thinking about abortion taking place on a continuum, and troubled by abortions, particularly later in pregnancy, as the child develops.

The question I can’t answer is where the moral inflection point is, when the fetus starts to have claims of its own, including the right to life. Does it depend on fetal development? If so, what aspect of fetal development? Brain waves? Feeling pain? Dreaming? The development of the spine? Viability outside the womb? Something else? Any line I might draw seems to me entirely arbitrary and capricious.

Because of that, I consider myself pro-life, but with caveats. My inability to identify a clear demarcation point—when a fetus becomes a person—argues for erring on the side of protecting the unborn. But it’s a prudential judgment, hardly a certain one.

At the same time, even if one believes that the moral needle ought to lean in the direction of protecting the unborn from abortion, that doesn’t mean one should be indifferent to the enormous burden on the woman who is carrying the child and seeks an abortion, including women who discover that their unborn child has severe birth defects. Nor does it mean that all of us who are disturbed by abortion believe it is the equivalent of killing a child after birth. In this respect, my view is similar to that of some Jewish authorities, who hold that until delivery, a fetus is considered a part of the mother’s body, although it does possess certain characteristics of a person and has value. But an early-term abortion is not equivalent to killing a young child. (Many of those who hold this position base their views in part on Exodus 21, in which a miscarriage that results from men fighting and pushing a pregnant woman is punished by a fine, but the person responsible for the miscarriage is not tried for murder.)

“There is not the slightest recognition on either side that abortion might be at the limits of our empirical and moral knowledge,” the columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in 1985. “The problem starts with an awesome mystery: the transformation of two soulless cells into a living human being. That leads to an insoluble empirical question: How and exactly when does that occur? On that, in turn, hangs the moral issue: What are the claims of the entity undergoing that transformation?”

That strikes me as right; with abortion, we’re dealing with an awesome mystery and insoluble empirical questions. Which means that rather than hurling invective at one another and caricaturing those with whom we disagree, we should try to understand their views, acknowledge our limitations, and even show a touch of grace and empathy. In this nation, riven and pulsating with hate, that’s not the direction the debate is most likely to take. But that doesn’t excuse us from trying.

[Sunsilver]

Most recent issue of The Lancet:
This is the truth, folks. But of course, those who have money will still be able to access safe abortion.

[N.E. Brigand]

A new poll from the Wall Street Journal find that the percentage of Americans who believe women should be able to get abortions for any reason whatsoever has risen from 38% in 2006 to 57% in 2022.

Abortion in cases of rape or incest is currently supported by more than 80%. Abortion in cases of likely birth defects is currently supported by more than 70%. Those numbers have bounced up and down between 70% and 90% over the past few decades.

The right to choose an abortion is quite popular.

[River]

Somehow I don't think anyone with power will care about what people actually want.

[Eldy]

I have no doubt that the second Roe is overturned (I'd like to say "if," but...), the argument will shift from "this matter should be decided by the states" to trying to ban it through other means. Either legislatively at the federal level (something Mitch McConnell is already playing coy about) or angling for a ban by the courts. I can't imagine many people with an ideological opposition to abortion will be satisfied with it only being illegal in some states. American political history demonstrates pretty conclusively that vanishingly few people actually care about states' rights or legislative supremacy in and of themselves; they're simply strategies adopted based on where a given faction has the greatest odds of success at getting the things they really want. I don't say this to take shots at any one ideology or party: it's how everything works. I'm not immune, either. I think it's messed up that we can even discuss the possibility of abortion being banned federally despite being favored by a majority of the country, but it would be dishonest to pretend that I would be fine with it being banned at any level of government so long as a majority supported that.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I agree, Eldy, which is one of the reasons why I think that those on the left who are desperately pushing for an end to the filibuster need to be careful what they wish for. There is a significantly likelihood that by January 2025 the filibuster will be the only barrier to a federal ban on abortion.

Of course, in all likelihood if the GOP gets control of the two houses of Congress and the presidency, they will have no qualms at doing away with the filibuster, despite their current objections to doing so.

[Eldy]

Yeah, I think there's a risk to discussing things like the filibuster and other deliberately undemocratic parts of the American system of government in moral terms. You have to be willing to play cutthroat so long as that's what the rules of the game incentivize, and doing away with the filibuster wouldn't change that.

That said, I can acknowledge how perverse it is to endorse a strategy that boils down to "let's keep federal policymaking in its current state of paralysis so at least it can't drag down the states that aren't backsliding on their own." I'm just not sure there's a viable alternative. Maybe a constitutional amendment mandating nonpartisan redistricting (and another getting rid of the electoral college) would be a sufficiently radical change to risk taking your foot off the brakes, but describing that as "viable" would be a bad joke.

...I don't like being this pessimistic, but the last seven years have done a number on me, and my former implicit belief in Whig history.

[RoseMorninStar]

Someone I know who is vehemently anti-abortion was complaining yesterday about the number of kids in foster care and the lack of foster parents/homes and I thought.. 'You ain't seen nothin' yet'. We do not have the social safety nets in place for this.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Maybe a constitutional amendment mandating nonpartisan redistricting (and another getting rid of the electoral college) would be a sufficiently radical change to risk taking your foot off the brakes, but describing that as "viable" would be a bad joke.

I don't know if you have seen my quixotic "Campaign for a New Bill of Rights" but both of those ideas are incorporated in it (as, of course, is protection of privacy rights including reproductive rights).

Campaign for a New Bill of Rights

[Eldy]

I had not read that before, Voronwë, but it warms my heart to see the text of the ERA (plus two words) right there at the top. And followed immediately by trans rights! I could get behind something like this if any party or faction ran on such a concept. Is the campaign an active thing or more about getting the idea of new amendments out there?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

It's active in the sense that I occasionally send the text to various politicians. I've never once gotten a response, but I still think that it worth getting it out there just to put into the ether, even though there is no viable path to passage in any imaginable future.