Breaking: claims that the American Supreme Court will strike down Roe v. Wade

[PurgatoryOfPotholes]

extract from article tonight

Headline:

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

Deliberations on controversial cases have in the past been fluid. Justices can and sometimes do change their votes as draft opinions circulate and major decisions can be subject to multiple drafts and vote-trading, sometimes until just days before a decision is unveiled. The court’s holding will not be final until it is published, likely in the next two months.

Continues: Article on leaked draft opinion

I agree with this but have never understood it. I mean, why is it that men are so anti women having abortions. we all know they don't care about the babies (they're certainly not insisting that the men who impregnated these women should then take responsibility). So WHY WHY WHY do they care so much?

They hate us? They don't want us to have the life choices we now have when we should be barefoot and pregnant.

Just hazarding a guess or two.

Any knowledgeable Americans around able to explain what, if anything, Obama or Biden could have done to prevent this? American law confuses me.

But they don't care about actual breathing, living women. They just care about getting their own way. They also don't care about the unwanted children once they're born.

There's another group that don't want women to have the right to say 'no' and it's the religious right.

So many groups united in their desire for women to have no agency over their own lives.

I am not an expert at all but I believe that there's not much they could have done to prevent this, though Obama let his nominee to the Supreme Court not be voted on by the Republicans. Had he persisted, perhaps the Republicans would be one fewer on the court?

But I have no idea if there could be a Federal law about abortion, and if so, why haven't the Democrats tried to create one at the times when they were the majority in both houses.

I think when Roe v. Wade is overturned each of the states decides on abortion laws on their own. More than one half probably won't allow abortion except perhaps when the woman's life is at risk and perhaps (though this is less certain) in the cases of rape and incest. Some states will keep abortion legal in roughly the same way it is today.

I am not an expert at all but I believe that there's not much they could have done to prevent this, though Obama let his nominee to the Supreme Court not be voted on by the Republicans. Had he persisted, perhaps the Republicans would be one fewer on the court?

Blimey, that's desperate.

Obama (or any other US president) doesn't get to dictate whether the US Senate votes on something. The leader of the Senate makes that decision, drawn from the majority Senate party.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate
The Senate's legislative and executive business is managed and scheduled by the Senate majority leader.

More info in an article from 2016:
www.npr.org/2016/09/06/492857860/173-days-and-counting-gop-unlikely-to-end-blockade-on-garland-nomination-soon?t=1651597021470
As of now, Garland has been waiting, in vain, for more than 170 days, well over the century-old, 125-day record. The prospect is, at best, many months more of waiting.
To sum up events to date, hours after Justice Antonin Scalia's death last February, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell announced that there would be no hearings, no votes, no action whatsoever, on any Supreme Court nomination until the American people got to vote on a new president.

Define woman

All of this.

It is truly depressing how day after day the evidence builds of just how much men hate women, resent everything women have, and see them as subhuman service animals.

I suppose we will go back to the way things were in my student days, where womens groups fundraised and funded/supported desperate women to escape abroad for an abortion, and helped them through it.

I'm not even going to jump through the 'women's/birthing bodies/bleeders/non men' hoops explaining that because this adds to everything else that makes it bloody stupid to deny that sex is binary and one group by accident of birth get the privilege to navel gaze, define and play with and gatekeep resources to the other group. To quote that article from a couple of weeks back: What is a woman? It's the half the population who are getting really increasingly pissed off. Vive le revolution.

The tenth amendment says:

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.

So absent a decision that the constitution confers a right to privacy that includes abortion (Griswold Roe and Casey decisions), then the states have the right to legislate on abortion not the federal government. Whether such legislation would have passed if proposed is unclear too especially since it was settled law in a legal system that respected precedent. And even if Obama had introduced and got through a federal abortion law, it could have been repealed in 2016 when the republicans had congress and the presidency.

Obama had no power to force the senate to vote on his candidate for the SC. I feel very strongly about Ruth Badar Ginsberg's selfish decision not to resign during the Obama terms. I think it colours every other aspect of her life and legacy.

States like mine (Massachusetts) already have a state constitutional protection for abortion as well as laws in place that will trigger as soon as Roe is overturned. Other states have the opposite - laws that ban abortion the minute roe is overturned. Those are mostly the states that also do fuck all for mothers and children living in poverty. It is a terrible state of affairs. If they overturn Roe, I suspect the right to gay marriage is next - it has even less historical weight than Roe. Mind you they may miss that one as it affects white middle class men and that wouldn't be nice for them. Griswold (right to contraception) will definitely be in the crosshairs.

I think the right to open carry firearms is also before the SC. So in a few months we will have no right to abortion and the right to carry a gun anywhere at all.

Thank you pallisers for the explanation.

Nice meme, 9amDrop, but it's wrongly labelled.

I'm highly critical of the social construct that is gender stereotyping – but oddly enough still manage to keep my eye on the ball re women's rights.

I know I'm not the only one.

Perhaps you could relabel it, "opportunist sealions who never cared about women's rights in the first place"?

What is with the memes….are you both 4? Can you only communicate through cartoons?

no actual comments or points about Roe vs Wade? Just snide little digs…

So now you're graciously loaning back the word women back to women. Is that what you're trying to say in this meme?

Like nobody was doing their damnedest to erase the word all of 5 minutes ago.

🙄

are you both 4?

Is this directed at me? In which case, I was agreeing with the PP that pro life seems to end when the baby is born and then the woman is dropped to sink or swim. Despite this obsession with banning access to safe abortions, there is serious resentment towards post-natal medical support, financial aid, cementing child support and penalties for those who 'opt out'.

The repeal of Roe v Wade won't suddenly see drafting of laws around these issues - it will simply put more and more women into poverty and ill health.

Given the make up of SCOTUS, it's not an unexpected result but a truly backward and depressing one.

Better?

No

it wasnt aimed at you

it was aimed at the two people who thought it was appropriate to use their posts just to have a pop at other posters on the thread

great post of yours, I’m sorry I wasn’t clear enough and you had to type the whole thing 💐

Your original post and meme were perfectly clear

No worries, Rufus. Didn't want to be seen as a plopper 😊

Here's hoping this really is a draft and it won't be passed in June/July!

This is so depressing if it turns out to be true. It will also disadvantage more black woman than white women.

Is that associated with the greater risk of poverty, lack of rural access to women's health facilities, location in particular anti-woman states for black women?

I’m struggling to understand the constitutional issues, eg what the Supreme Court determines, what federal legislature determines and what state legislatures determine.

heard a joe biden snippet earlier this evening where he argued that, based on the rationale in the draft judgment, ie that the legislatures not the Supreme Court should determine the law on these matters, lots of other areas of law would fall into the same category.

Oh look, a 'shit cartoon' (Katy's own words) by someone who likes to appropriate feminist issues they don't actually have any stake in so that they can claim they are a 'better feminist' (and presumably therefore better at womaning) than actual women?

Did anyone see C4 news coverage if the protests outside the SC earlier?

On the one side of the protest, right-wing Christian nutters shouting about women’s bodies.

On the other side, a woman requesting equality for ‘people of all gender expressions’.

Absolutely bananas.

WDI USA statement:

womensdeclarationusa.com/wdi-usa-statement-on-the-leaked-opinion-in-roe-v-wade/

Thanks for the explanations, all.

That seems to be the sum of it. Strange that they seem to not understand that their memes are doing great work in highlighting the fact that they themselves are doing nothing but jeering women discussing this issue and the ramifications.

There are a number of levels to those cartoons that work against the overly simplistic meaning they seem to think is wonderful.

(And I am not referring to SanFrans cartoon either, where the meaning is directly clear)