The end of Roe v. Wade: Open Thread

Getting an abortion IS taking responsibility for your actions.

And what’s with capitalizing Man but not Woman? You’re letting your misogyny hang out dude. People can see it.

And for what it’s worth, gun control might not even work in practice. Think about it: who’s going to enforce any given gun control law, the same police we’ve known are just itching for an excuse to brutalize others and often make up a significant proportion of the extremists that carry out mass shootings like the Buffalo one in the first place?

Any type of disarmament that isn’t multilateral and allows police to retain their own guns would only exacerbate all the issues that come with mass imprisonment and police brutality. Averting school shootings would be at best a side effect of something whose true goal would be to further cement the state’s monopoly on force. All in the name of social order (read: the perpetuation of the status quo and the supremacy of the ruling classes), of course.

For doctors, abortion restrictions create an ‘impossible choice’ when providing care

@loucpurr

Your right. One of the reasons we stopped trying is that If something goes wrong with a pregnancy, we have to go to a different state. Even if it something like the fetus is septic or I’m bleeding out. Doctor’s here can’t help me.

@Joaquin

You told women if their pregnancy was going to kill them they can “eat shit and die”

@Joaquin

It’s not spamming it’s just telling the truth. You want women and their babies to die during pregnancy so they can take responsibility and men don’t have to pay for it. That’s your idea of a great time.

LOL at the idea that having an abortion isn’t taking responsibility. It’s taking steps toward a solution. It’s just not the solution Jaoquin likes because the suffering for the woman is over too soon. Gosh darn it, pregnancy should be punishment!

@LouCPurr

Maybe someday. There are other medical reasons to. I’m at high risk for complications with pregnancy. And if I cant get treatment should those complications happen. Then it’s to dangerous to try for a baby

Course that choice may be taken away from me If dipshit judge gets his way to make it illegally for birth control again.

@Joaquin

I love to see criminals kill as many children with knives as they do guns.

@sunny

Yeah and according to those red states, if I can’t afford to go across the country to get an abortion then I shouldn’t be having a baby at all. So you know. They tell me not to have sex with my husband at all.

Oh, and here’s a demonstration on how to use the quote function:

1) Bodily autonomy? Really? As far as i can tell, you cannot sell your own organs.

Yes. You can’t sell your own organs. But there are people who will tell somebody who’s pregnant that they should stay pregnant “for the sake of the baby.” Or “to give the baby a chance to live.” Or similar drivel. Pregnancy is hard on the body. Complications include gestational diabetes, dependent edema, hypertension, depression, and of course stillbirth.

2) Nice straw man there, but most countries provide legal abortions in case of rape or health issues.

Not a straw man, I’m afraid. In my own state, healthcare professionals have been required by law to spout absolute bullshit before advising a patient on abortion. Many doctors and nurses will say the words, but they may follow up the required speech by saying, “I’m required by law to say that, but here’s what the current medical reality is.” Or they will turn on the radio or run the water in the exam room’s sink so that the legally required bullshit is hard to hear.

So you can google all you want about what is legal in Canada or other countries, but since I’m talking about what happens in the United States, you’ve constructed a very clumsy reply.

Only ONE PERCENT of abortions are caused by rape, and only THREE PERCENT are for “health problems”. Yet, feminists act as if pregnancy was a DEATH SENTENCE.

That’s because it can be. As I noted earlier, pregnancy is hard on the body. Pregnancy is also expensive in the United States these days, and if you think getting stuck with an enormous hospital bill doesn’t present a hardship, then I assume you live in a country with universal healthcare where medical bills aren’t the number-one reason why people have to declare bankruptcy.

Oh, and as a tip, abortions aren’t usually caused by rape (though certainly sufficient trauma can induce a miscarriage). Abortions are usually caused by dilating the cervix and removing the products of conception. (In case you think I’m using some sort of dehumanizing euphemism, “products of conception” is the correct medical term as it includes the placenta, which shouldn’t stay behind in the uterus.) Plus you haven’t identified your source or stated what country those statistics are from, which is another very clumsy reply on your part. Again.

3) “Banning abortions stops safe abortions”: Somewhere in the USA a bunch of Gun Runners are laughing their asses.

And somewhere a bunch of historians are laughing at you.

4) Forcing others to adopt your beliefs Is wrong, except If those beliefs are the ones you like.

Tsk, tsk. I specified that you can govern your own behavior based on your religious beliefs, but that it was wrong to expect other people to live by your religious beliefs. One of the earliest Americans to advocate for religious freedom (to practice your faith and let others practice their faith) was the Rev. Roger Williams. You may want to google that. He was a fascinating man and deserves more attention.

Based on his bringing up statistics from Argentina, I have to assume Joaquin apparently thinks his country’s standards apply everywhere.

https://www.hrw.org/americas/argentina

Let’s just say his country isn’t in a position to be lecturing anybody about what rights should and shouldn’t be upheld, especially when it comes to abortion.

I was doing most of my reacting to this on Wonkette, and then a good portion of today doing anything OTHER than focussing on Dobbs.

Now I’m here & there’s Joaquin, but the troll is already well in hand, so until Joaquin comes back, I’ll just say a bit about the larger context of this decision.

This week SCOTUS ruled against abortion in Dobbs, true, but it also ruled against habeas corpus in 2 cases, dramatically limiting the ability to appeal a conviction based on radical and ahistorical reinvention of how different habeas pleas interact.

The court also ruled against a gun control and safety measure that has been state law in NY for over 110 years, saying that it wasn’t sufficiently “historically grounded” and that there was no “tradition” of laws like NY’s in US jurisprudence. Of course, the law itself is long enough to historically ground its powers if it was operating without risk of unconstitutional deprivations for 111 years. Not only this, but the court ignored stricter gun control laws that frequently required giving up one’s gun to the local marshal when entering specific towns that had had histories of violence. Some of these laws operated at the state level, granting discretionary authorization to the local marshals to decide when to ban all guns from their town on the basis of recent violence. Other laws were local statutes. None were challenged, none were found unconstitutional, and they operated in a variety of jurisdictions (mainly west of the Mississippi) from before the civil war (and thus before the 14th Amendment was ratified) until well after 1900. In other words, they were more severe gun restrictions that were in continuous operation at the time of the 14th’s ratification and on through the passage of the NY law. Although their historicity test is fucked up on multiple levels, it’s also incredibly important to note that the NY law would pass the historicity test if SCOTUS was honest. Instead, SCOTUS said that because no one ever questioned the constitutionality of such gun-free-town laws, that means no court ever ruled on their constitutionality and thus SCOTUS can’t be **sure** that people really thought that they were constitutional. Thus they don’t count, and NY’s law has no historical grounding.

The Dobbs ruling, of course is famously grotesque in its historical justifications, citing obiter dicta — comments contained within a ruling that aren’t the basis for the ruling — from a man who thought witchcraft was a thing and that people should be burned to death on the basis of supernatural evidence. Although I’m no expert in the history of abortion laws, i’m told that even that portion of the court’s history that deals with post-1789 regulation of abortion is deeply misleading and sometimes flat out false.

Put that all together and it seems to me as a well-informed non-expert that the court has abandoned jurisprudence altogether and is fabricating “reasoning” that not only isn’t accurate, but that the court doesn’t intend to be accurate, in order to provide superficial cover for terrible decisions.

And I’m not the only one. I have plenty of friends who practice law in the USA and who are therefore more qualified to comment than I am. One of them said this:

(I was going to post a screenshot, but now I’ll transcribe it since I can’t seem to make a screenshot happen)

I refuse to analyze the jurisprudence of this court because, frankly, we are not seeing jurisprudence. We are seeing an agenda. You can tell the difference because even a conservative serious about their jurisprudence knows where logic dictates a stopping point. An ideologue just keeps going.

With all that for context, I’m going to hazard a guess on where this court is going next:

1. Obergefell: they want to overrule the right to marry regardless of gender.
2. Lawrence v. Texas: they want to recriminalize queer sex, so they’ll remove its protections and allow fascist states to do their fascist thing
3. Romer v. Evans: they want to pretend that there is no such thing as improper animus against queer people that might motivate legislators. They absolutely hate this one, and will make it harder to prove a law was discriminatory. Hard to say exactly what they’ll do with this. They might limit it in an unexpected way, perhaps by embracing the “animus” standard and forcing plaintiffs to prove what is in the hearts and minds of legislators, while allowing legislators that say endless horrible things outside of the legislative chambers to make an anodyne statement about, “I am not motivated by animus, I am only passing this law because X” and then force courts to take the statement in legislative chambers as definitive, even when the full context makes clear it’s completely disingenuous.
4. Texas v. Johnson: they want to ban flag burning, but all they can do on their own is end the constitutional protection for burning a US flag as political speech.
5. Reed v. Reed: they want to chip away at what they see as the “excesses” of gender equality in constitutional jurisprudence. In particular they’re pissed at US v. Virginia, et al. (VMI) for heightening the level of scrutiny gender discrimination receives, and also because they hate the Notorious RBG and that was her first (of many) landmark decision. Gutting VMI would be giving the finger to a beloved feminist justice. One thing to watch is whether they decide to revert to pre-Reed v. Reed rules that permits states to ban women from jury service entirely.
6. Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah (1993) this is a religious freedom case, but it supports the freedoms of non-Christians. Expect minority religions who expect relief under the precedent of Lukumi Babalu Aye to get a skeptical eye from this court. Tactics similar to Romer v. Evans might also be used here.
7. Griswold v. Connecticut: This is the one that everyone cites, and it’s true. They’re going hard after reproductive freedoms.

In addition to all this, they’ll be attacking immigration and they’ll also fuck with the Biden administration, but write those decisions in such a way that they aren’t useful as precedents (deciding on particularly narrow grounds, or just flat out declaring that it’s a decision but not a precedent in the same way that they did in Bush v. Gore). I’m not knowledgeable enough in US immigration law to know the cases that they might want to overturn (or resurrect), but they will certainly be limiting magistrate judges authority to grant relief to applicants for admission or asylum, and expanding powers of the executive to deny admission or asylum.

I’ve been paying attention to SCOTUS for a long time, and this is the worst week I can remember. We’re in for a lot more serious shit than just loss of abortion rights and attacks on birth control.