“Establishment” alternative to Trump endorses theocracy in Alabama

And no one should be confident that this majority is done with its work. The right Roe and Casey recognized does not stand alone. To the contrary, the Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation. Most obviously, the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception. See Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965); Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972). In turn, those rights led, more recently, to rights of same-sex intimacy and marriage. See Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003); Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015). They are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decisionmaking over the most personal of life decisions. The majority (or to be more accurate, most of it) is eager to tell us today that nothing it does “cast[s] doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Ante, at 66; cf. ante, at 3 (Thomas, J., concurring) (advocating the overruling of Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell). But how could that be? The lone rationale for what the majority does today is that the right to elect an abortion is not “deeply rooted in history”: Not until Roe, the majority argues, did people think abortion fell within the Constitution’s guarantee of liberty.  The same could be said, though, of most of the rights the majority claims it is not tampering with. The majority could write just as long an opinion showing, for example, that until the mid-20th century, “there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain [contraceptives].”  So one of two things must be true. Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.

–Breyer, Sototomayor, and Kagan JJ. Dobbs v. Jackson Woman’s Health (dissenting)

Let’s check in on the reasonable, moderate, thinking person’s alternative to Donald Trump in the Republican Party with respect to the recent ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court that the state cannot permit IVF because God doesn’t like it:

Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley said Wednesday that frozen embryos created through in-vitro fertilization are “babies,” siding with a recent Alabama Supreme Court decision that raised concerns among doctors and patients about the future of the procedure.

“Embryos, to me, are babies,” Haley told NBC News in an interview, adding that she used artificial insemination to have her son, a different process than IVF that doesn’t present the same complexities around creating embryos in a lab. “When you talk about an embryo, you are talking about, to me, that’s a life. And so I do see where that’s coming from when they talk about that.”

Classifying embryos as children under state law raises significant questions about whether the practice, used by families having trouble conceiving, could continue in states like Alabama. Unused embryos are often destroyed, which could open families or clinics up to wrongful death lawsuits under this policy. Storing frozen embryos, meanwhile, is expensive.

Later on Wednesday, the University of Alabama at Birmingham announced that it was pausing IVF treatments in response to the state Supreme Court ruling.

If Dobbs stopped solely with aboriton rights, it would be plenty bad enough. But it will go much further than that — Alito’s felt need to lie about it notwithstanding, Republicans are as committed to the entire reactionary worldview the decision represents as they are to denying people access to healthcare.