After 49 years of legal debate, protests and political battles over the composition of the Supreme Court, the courtfinally has a Roe v. Wade caseOverturned.
No matter how you feel about abortion, this should be welcomed as a sound development for the rule of law created by American democracy and national representatives. Roe was a legal mistake that played a major role in upsetting our national affairs. Now the democratic process will determine what happens to abortion.
Before Roe, almost every state in the Commonwealth banned or restricted abortion, but in more situations it tended to allow abortion. That trend traced the liberalization of divorce law and other features of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, both at home and abroad. Roe stopped it all in its orbit and brilliantly wiped out books in almost every state law at once. (New York law was the most forgiving in the United States and allowed abortions for up to 24 weeks.)
The Supreme Court's job is to read, not write. Nothing in the Constitution indirectly mentions abortion, and no one thought that before the 1970s the Constitution legalized abortion. At that time, even legal scholars in favor of abortion thought Law was unsightly. The trimester framework can be read more like a part of legislation than a judicial reasoning, but it is still democratic from the compromises and changes over time that normally fall into the commonly enacted law. Eliminates the process.
Roe's undemocratic nature causes repulsion and promotes the pro-life movement. Politics was much stronger than it was in 1973. It revolutionized the way political conservatives think about the Constitution. It mobilized conflicting factions in national elections, polarized along religious and cultural lines. It turned the Supreme Court nomination into a circus. It sometimes caused violence.
All the energy normally spent in politics and legislation in parliament and state legislature has been driven into a national all-or-nothing battle for the Supreme Court that lasted decades.
Get the latest information on the post following the Supreme Court's ruling to overturn the Roe v. Wade case.
When presidential candidates such as Donald Trump and Bill Clinton cheated, their supporters were all presidents because Law was always in the referendum. He claimed that the election stakes were too high to dispute.
It's not healthy. In America, people are supposed to make a law. Now they can. People in different parts of the country are free to disagree again. Some states, such as New York, strongly support the choice and continue to allow legal abortions. Some, like Mississippi, are strongly pro-life and ban or strictly limit it.
As in many European countries, some people allow early abortion but ban abortion after some point during pregnancy. Some people will hold a referendum in November this year, either directly or shortly afterwards, asking voters questions. Congress decides what the federal government pays and what it doesn't. Maybe we will have a national law on abortion, or even a constitutional amendment — but only if there is a strong national consensus to pass it.
On top of that, people decide.
