What If Roe Fell?
October 20, 2004 7:08 PM   Subscribe

The State-by-State Consequences of Overturning Roe v. Wade (PDF.) Over 70 million American women could lose access to abortion in their states, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights.
posted by homunculus (15 comments total)
 
The icon of Roe vs. Wade has become an obstacle to both sides of the debate. The anti-abortionists have chipped away at it, but it remains, yet it is not a good legal foundation on which the pro-abortionists can build.

First and foremost, abortion should not be based on a "right to privacy", which is a horrible construct, but on an exclusionary constructionist principle: that neither the federal nor State governments have any authority whatsoever to regulate abortion granted to them in the Constitution. Were the Supreme Court to have stated this right off the bat, the only remedy would be a Constitutional Amendment outlawing abortion. With slim chance for passage.

The window of opportunity for correcting this oversight was lost, and it will now be years before the chance comes again.
posted by kablam at 7:41 PM on October 20, 2004


Kablam:

Article [X.]

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 7:50 PM on October 20, 2004


The party of small government should absolutely be allowed to regulate your bodily functions.
posted by interrobang at 8:24 PM on October 20, 2004


The abortion argument is extremely simple.

Pro-lifers believe an unborn baby is human life, so its protection is identical to the protection of the life of a 5-year-old in an abusive household.

Pro-choicers believe the baby is the property of the mother, so privacy rights come in to play.

Since pro-lifers view unborn babies as human life, they consider pregnancy much more than one of "your bodily functions". It's not about privacy or government intervention, it's about which class unborn babies fall into (people or property?)

kablam: exactly. Roe has become iconic, even though the protection of abortion is barely based on it. (See Casey, Carhart). Roe has been overturned, practically. It's all about "undue burden".
posted by zelphi at 8:46 PM on October 20, 2004


More like "people or parasites", zelphi. If the thing is unwanted, and cannot possibly survive outside of its host, the host has every right to get rid of it.
posted by interrobang at 9:13 PM on October 20, 2004


zelphi wins for actually stating the core of the debate.

interrobang: what standard of survival? Leave an infant carried to term alone without care and it won't survive outside of its former host long at all. Premies back into the second trimester can survive with proper care.

Abortion is not one of those questions because there's simple and comprehensive answers...
posted by weston at 9:20 PM on October 20, 2004


And when the mother's life is at risk? Is a mother not a life?
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 9:25 PM on October 20, 2004


Pro-lifers believe an unborn baby is human life, so its protection is identical to the protection of the life of a 5-year-old in an abusive household.

Funny, I don't hear anywhere near as much out of the pro-life groups about this as I do about abortion, and I imagine this is a much bigger problem, all those unwanted kids getting in the way and all.
posted by interrobang at 9:29 PM on October 20, 2004


interrobang: i think antiabortion folk want to believe that the poor, unwanted children who didn't get aborted will be magically adopted by some loving parents. what they fail to take into consideration, however, is that american adoption laws favor the rights of the parents to such an extent that those who can adopt would sooner adopt a child from a country with laws that favor the adoptive parent.
posted by pxe2000 at 9:57 PM on October 20, 2004


Wake up. It's already difficult in many states to get an abortion. Your rights have already been eroded.
posted by fleener at 10:20 PM on October 20, 2004


interrobang & pxe2000: (most) Pro-lifers don't have any misconceptions about the plight of unwanted children, they just don't believe in any type of euthanasia. They don't believe the possibility of an uncomfortable life is a valid reason to terminate a pregnancy.

I personally believe abortion is murder, but I don't have a problem with that murder for practical reasons.
posted by zelphi at 10:23 PM on October 20, 2004


"I personally believe abortion is murder"

I personally believe abortion is abortion. Calling it murder is a classic stawman troll. How can we have rational debate about this issue when one side is channeling PETA?
posted by y6y6y6 at 5:39 AM on October 21, 2004


zelphi, could you not muddy the waters? I believe you mean to say that: 1. (Some) Pro-lifers do not believe in euthanasia AND 2. (Some) Pro-lifers believe that abortion is a form of euthanasia. Claiming that everyone (pro-life and pro-choice) believes that "euthanasia" is a neutral term is misleading.

As to my own current annoyance on the issue: can we stop demonizing birth control? Encouraging pro-abstinence education is great, but it's also always been the norm. Giving only marginal information on birth control and discouraging anyone from buying it by making it difficult is ridiculous. Buying condoms should be a shameless, routine thing, and nobody should be questioned for doing so. Just as no one should ever be questioned or mocked for choosing abstinence. They're both socially responsible choices.
posted by mikeh at 6:46 AM on October 21, 2004


It's not "murder" it's "ending a pregnancy".
posted by bshort at 8:10 AM on October 21, 2004


Anti-abortion != Pro-life, most of these people are very pro-death penalty. Stop the marketing spin. Whereas pro-choice is a generally reasonable label since no one wearing that label AFAIK has ever proposed requiring abortion in any circumstance.
posted by billsaysthis at 2:35 PM on October 21, 2004


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