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It's my understanding it's argued the right to an abortion is given from the 14th amendment. I didn't really see anything from the dissenting opinion about ho
by JamesBarney 4y ago
It's my understanding it's argued the right to an abortion is given from the 14th amendment.
I didn't really see anything from the dissenting opinion about how the right to an abortion is given by women's right to voting, property or divorce (?).
- specialist 4y agoHow could they have been more explicit? From the dissent (emphasis mine): JUSTICE BREYER, JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, and JUSTICE KAGAN, dissenting. For half a century, Roe v. Wade, and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, have protected the liberty and equality of women. Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that the Constitution safeguards a woman’s right to decide for herself whether to bear a child. Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that in the first stages of pregnancy, the government could not make that choice for women. The government could not control a woman’s body or the course of a woman’s life: It could not determine what the woman’s future would be. Respecting a woman as an autonomous being, and granting her full equality, meant giving her substantial choice over this most personal and most consequential of all life decisions. ... Whatever the exact scope of the coming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens. Yesterday, the Constitution guaranteed that a woman confronted with an unplanned pregnancy could (within reasonable limits) make her own decision about whether to bear a child, with all the life-transforming consequences that act involves. And in thus safeguarding each woman’s reproductive freedom, the Constitution also protected “[t]he ability of women to participate equally in [this Nation’s] economic and social life.”. But no longer. As of today, this Court holds, a State can always force a woman to give birth, prohibiting even the earliest abortions. A State can thus transform what, when freely undertaken, is a wonder into what, when forced, may be a nightmare. Some women, especially women of means, will find ways around the State’s assertion of power. Others—those without money or childcare or the ability to take time off from work—will not be so fortunate. Maybe they will try an un- safe method of abortion, and come to physical harm, or even die. Maybe they will undergo pregnancy and have a child, but at significant personal or familial cost. At the least, they will incur the cost of losing control of their lives. The Constitution will, today’s majority holds, provide no shield, despite its guarantees of liberty and equality for all. ... 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. In turn, those rights led, more recently, to rights of same-sex intimacy and marriage. They are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decisionmaking over the most personal of life decisions.
- belorn 4y agoThose words in the dissent would work as a nice template for a human right: The government could not control a human’s body or the course of a human’s life: It could not determine what the human’s future would be. Respecting a human as an autonomous being, and granting them full equality, meant giving them substantial choice over their most personal and most consequential of all life decisions. It is very clear from the text that the decision to have a child is more than just the pregnancy or the birth. It is also about the life-transforming consequences, the childcare and the time and money to raise a child. It is about the social impact and the lives that such choice impact. All those belong in a human right where willing consent of parenthood should be in focus.
- specialist 4y agoYes and: The pedantic nature of our adversarial system really bothers me. The focus on very narrow circumstances and edge cases. It prevents reaching reasonable outcomes. There are always dilemmas and paradoxes. The proper job of the Court is to find the middle path. Consider the whole system and strike a balance. Arbitrate an acceptable consensus. And that requires mitigating a decision's downsides. That was the approach of the German Courts. In addition to proscribing the rules around abortion, they also put into place structures to reduce the need for abortions, improving the health and well being of all women and children. So reasonable. Sounds like heaven.
- comex 4y agoThe argument is that the right to abortion follows from the 14th Amendment's guarantee that "liberty" is not deprived without due process. This is linked to other rights that were derived from the same clause, including contraception, cross-racial marriage, and same-sex intimacy and marriage. Some of the text you quoted also seems to hint at (but does not explicitly discuss) the other clauses of the 14th Amendment, the one about "privileges and immunities of citizens" and the one about "equal protection of the laws". Other parts you quoted are simply arguments for why abortion is part of "liberty". Regarding your previous examples: - Right to own property: In Kirchberg v. Feenstra, a law giving sole control of marital property to the husband was found unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause. So it's related to Roe v. Wade's Due Process argument, but not quite the same. - Right to vote: This was explicitly granted by the 19th Amendment. Before that, the Supreme Court had ruled in Minor v. Happersett that the 14th Amendment's Privileges and Immunities Clause did not give women the right to vote, though one might imagine that the Roe court (or the Dobbs dissenters) would have disagreed (or would have found that right in a different part of the 14th Amendment). - Right to divorce: I can't find any major Supreme Court cases trying to establish such a right. All fifty states allow for no-fault divorce, but that's grounded in state law and is only true as of 2010.