Coming Soon To An Op-Ed Page Near You!
By Our “new” troll Fred Jones “unhinged liberal” has managed to distill every idiotic argument commonly seen about anti-Roe countermobilization into one comment! Just for fun, let’s go through every fallacy one at a time:
Issues that are decided in this manner do us no good because the decisions are not accepted by the governed. It’s been 34 years and we are still struggling with this. Quality of decision matters.
Roe, has, of course, been accepted by a strong majority of the governed. But more to the point, the idea that the quality of legal reasoning has anything to do with the reaction to Roe is absurd. (Anybody remember the massive Republican outrage about Bush v. Gore, which makes Roe look like a masterpiece of legal reasoning? Must have missed that.) First of all, nobody without a professional obligation reads Supreme Court opinions. And second, Roe if anything, polls better than the underlying position of legal pre-viability abortions, which is the opposite of what one would predict if the poor reasoning of Roe had the slightest relevance to its public reaction. Roe could have been better argued, but the outcome of the case was plausible, and in any case the quality of Blackmun’s opinion is irrelevant to whether or not it will endure.
Now, just think if this decision had involved the governed such as going through a democratic process. Maybe a referendum….maybe a Senate bill. Win or lose, people would accept the decision more as a legitimate one and chances are we wouldn’t be still doing this.
This would be plausible…if you knew nothing about politics or what abortion politics looked like before Roe. Rather than accepting abortion liberalization, the forced pregnancy lobby got the legislatures of New York and Pennsylvania to pass bills re-criminalizing abortion, which had to be vetoed. The idea that abortion would cease to become a salient issue if the courts would just stop protecting reproductive rights at all and turn everything over to Congress and 50 state legislatures is transparently ridiculous. Abortion is a major issue because there’s a major constituency in this country to punish (poor) women who choose to get abortions and get uppity about their proper place in society; what institution resolves the issue is irrelevant. If Roe were overturned, the issue would still be a major part of politics, except that many states would then have abortion bans, contrary to long-standing privacy and gender equality precedents, which would do very little to protect fetal life and a great deal to endanger women’s health.
Also, like it or not judicial review is a part of the American “democratic process.”
What does it say about the pro-abortion people if they don’t trust the people to make the right choice? It says they think they might be in the minority and can’t take the chance.
Actually, for those of us whose knowledge of politics doesn’t come entirely from bad 5th Grade civics textbooks, it means that 1)we understand that American legislatures are not consistently majoritarian in either theory or practice, 2)the de facto exemption affluent women inevitably have from aboriton bans skew legislative outcomes even more strongly towards the forced pregnancy minority, and 3)fundamental individual rights should not subject to unlimited legislative control in any case.
My question: when does a slightly longer version of this comment show up in Slate?