You believe it is right on a technicality, but don't care to factor in the women who are guaranteed an early, unnecessary death because of this ruling?
People are guaranteed early, unnecessary deaths when they cannot afford expensive medical treatments for their rare conditions. Or insulin for their diabetes. Or housing for their family.
Where in our constitution and laws are these things codified as rights? They are not.
In the same way, abortion is not a right. But I believe it should be. This is an issue that our elected officials must decide, not the courts.
"Where in our constitution and laws are these things codified as rights?"
Um, how about Roe v Wade and the TEN times the Supreme Court upheld RvW since it was decided, including as recently as 2016? The court just blew up precedent with a ten ton nuke and you're arguing hey, it was just good jurisprudence!
Do you understand the difference between the constitution and the courts? The court does not invent rights, nor should it. It is the federal government’s responsibility to codify rights, and it is the courts responsibility to affirm them.
Separate but equal was precedent for a long time as well, would you be arguing the same for that?
You're ignoring what I said, which is that a right established by the highest court, and ten times affirmed by the highest court, including as recently as 6 years ago, just obliterated that entire history in a ruling that is guaranteed to carry a toll in human health and human lives.
"The court does not invent rights, nor should it."
It has established many specific rights that are not articulated in the Constitution or codified in laws. Most still stand.
"Separate but equal was precedent for a long time as well, would you be arguing the same for that?"
I'm confused, how many vulnerable women died as a result of that?
> You're ignoring what I said, which is that a right established by the highest court, and ten times affirmed by the highest court, including as recently as 6 years ago, just obliterated that entire history in a ruling that is guaranteed to carry a toll in human health and human lives.
All of this posturing is irrelevant to the fact that the right which was granted did not follow from the arguments being made. Our courts should follow sound reasoning when establishing unenumerated rights. They also should not care about what the impact would be downstream of their decisions; their reasoning should stand on its own.
> It has established many specific rights that are not articulated in the Constitution or codified in laws. Most still stand.
And some no longer do.
> I'm confused, how many vulnerable women died as a result of that?
Impossible to say, but it had to be a non-negligible amount. Either way, that has no bearing on which way the court should rule.
The laws represent the will of the people via their elected representatives. The court adjudicates these laws and their validity as it relates to our constitution.
"They also should not care about what the impact would be downstream of their decisions; their reasoning should stand on its own."
Do we live in the same reality? As the dissenting justices stated, "The majority's refusal even to consider the life-altering consequences of reversing Roe and Casey is a stunning indictment of its decision."
Judges are not law-interpreting robots and no one ever pretended they are supposed to be (until you I guess). Their decisions impact the health and welfare of hundreds of millions of human beings and to not incorporate that reality into their work would be monstrously inhumane. There is a long history of rulings directly referencing the impact of decisions, to argue otherwise is a lie or disingenuous.
None of your analogies are applicable. Somebody dying because their personal circumstances made receiving medical care difficult or impossible, is patently different than dying because someone else was allowed to deny them medical care by imposing their personal religious beliefs.
How is pregnancy not a personal circumstance? Anyway, you are right that they are not directly comparable because pregnancy and abortion are such unique things. I suppose the most similar analogy I could think of is a doctor refusing to perform a surgery which has a high chance of outright killing a patient and a smaller chance of treating the issue.
Either way, there is no constitutional right to an abortion, and that is the fundamental issue. Call your representatives and demand them to take action on codifying the right to abortion.
Pregnancy does not, in and of itself, prevent access to medical care. So while it is a personal circumstance, it is entirely inapplicable within the context of care being intentionally prevented.
> I suppose the most similar analogy I could think of is a doctor refusing to perform a surgery which has a high chance of outright killing a patient and a smaller chance of treating the issue.
Not analogous, at all. That's a medical professional making a single medical decision based on medical information. That surgeon is not preventing the patient from finding another surgeon who will perform the procedure. Whereas what you're suggesting, is that freedom of religion should give politicians the right to make a singular blanket medical decision on behalf of everyone in their state, present and future, without any situational knowledge or medical reasoning.
It's not a constitutional right to abortion. It's a constitutional right to not have personal liberties stripped by the states which are enumerated in the Constitution. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion and right to privacy are all enumerably applicable to preserving this liberty. The ability for anyone to impose their personal religious beliefs on a population violates all of those rights.
I don’t know why you keep bringing up religion, I have not mentioned it at all. Perhaps you are conflating the reason for some states passing of anti-abortion laws with the law itself.
Either way, the federal government does not grant this right, therefore it is up to states to decide.
> It's a constitutional right (9th amendment) to not have personal liberties stripped by the states which are not enumerated in the Constitution. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion and right to privacy are all enumerably applicable to preserving this liberty.
None of these rights apply to abortion. If anything, there should be an enumerated right to bodily autonomy.
> I don’t know why you keep bringing up religion, I have not mentioned it at all.
The only objection anyone has to abortion is based on religious beliefs. So, you didn't need to mention it. It's the foundation of the entire issue -- that religious beliefs can be imposed on a population as law. Saying that it's irrelevant to the discussion betrays an ignorance of the subject at hand.
> None of these rights apply to abortion. If anything, there should be an enumerated right to bodily autonomy.
The enumeration does not need to specifically reference the word to be applicable. For a different example, the 4th amendment doesn't contain any verbiage about police officers opening a trunk during a traffic stop, but the declaration that they must have probable cause still applies. In the exact same way, to assert religious beliefs that affect someone else's medical care violates all of the rights I listed.
> The only objection anyone has to abortion is based on religious beliefs
Uh…what? I am not religious (agnostic/atheist) but I object to abortion after a certain amount of time except in the cases of grave bodily harm or being the product of forced reproduction (idk what the site rules are on certain language, but I trust you understand what I mean). I believe that the unborn baby is a viable human life at some point and that abortion without a justifiable reason after that point would be equivalent to murder. I also believe many people also feel the same way I do.
> The enumeration does not need to specifically reference the word to be applicable
Yes, but we are in disagreement on which rights are applicable in this case.
> I believe that the unborn baby is a viable human life at some point and that abortion without a justifiable reason after that point would be equivalent to murder.
That's the entire point! You're not objecting to abortion. You're objecting at some point in time and only when it's medically unjustifiable. But those moral thresholds are different for every individual and there are medically justifiable situations, which is exactly why no individual should be able to impose their personal beliefs as a law which declares those medical situations as unjustifiable.
You're welcome to have moral objections and believe they are the most correct or reasonable, but they have no bearing on the concerted efforts of religious groups and individuals to outright ban access to medical care. And that's the discussion at hand, which you keep conveniently ignoring. Many people have total opposition to all abortions in all situations and specifically for religious reasons, which is what actual, real-life politicians are implementing as we speak.
Someone else having an abortion (whether you believe it's murder or not) doesn't infringe on your rights. But you imposing your beliefs in a way that affects someone else's medical care is absolutely infringing on their rights. These are fundamental concepts of our democracy.
Just because everyone may not be be able to agree on exactly when that viability threshold is or what reasons are justifiable does not mean we should not attempt to do so. Almost all states (and other countries) where abortion is legalized still have reasonable limits on when they may be performed (e.g., not after second trimester). I think we would both agree that an abortion of an otherwise viable and healthy baby one day before expected delivery would be unethical.
The religious arguments for banning all abortion for any reasons are not sound and I would not expect such laws to pass scrutiny when challenged in court (but who knows nowadays).
Many things people do don’t infringe on my rights. Someone murdering another person doesn’t infringe MY rights, but it is still wrong. A parent beating their child doesn’t infringe my rights but is still abuse.
All this being said, I support the right of a woman to receive an abortion, within reason. It is up to our elected officials to codify this right. It is not, nor should it ever be, the responsibility of the court to attempt to enshrine a right that does not exist through case law.
> Almost all states (and other countries) where abortion is legalized still have reasonable limits on when they may be performed (e.g., not after second trimester). I think we would both agree that an abortion of an otherwise viable and healthy baby one day before expected delivery would be unethical.
Your moral compass isn't accounting for the logistics of pregnancy. At any point during a pregnancy or childbirth, complications can arise which risk the mother's life, and a medical decision is most often made to save her instead of a potentially healthy child. By both medical and legal definition, this is still an abortion. To declare that it's not ethical to abort in these situations is a declaration that it is ethical to kill the mother. So, we very much do not agree that the ethics of abortion are obvious or even quantifiable.
> Many things people do don’t infringe on my rights. Someone murdering another person doesn’t infringe MY rights, but it is still wrong. A parent beating their child doesn’t infringe my rights but is still abuse.
I think you missed the point here, or I wasn't clear enough. Given that the spectrum of ethics doesn't allow for a standard threshold of "murder" and we've already established that abortions are a medical necessity, the only case against the right to abortion boils down to being personally offended by someone else's actions. If medical care can be decided by personal offense and codified into a law that is guaranteed to be harmful, then we don't actually have the freedoms described in the Constitution.
> Yes, but we are in disagreement on which rights are applicable in this case. [...] It is not, nor should it ever be, the responsibility of the court to attempt to enshrine a right that does not exist through case law.
Freedom of speech protects the moral threshold discussed earlier. Right to privacy protects medical information. Freedom of religion is based on separation of church and state, which means religious beliefs shouldn't hold any bearing at the federal level, particularly because they may directly contradict the beliefs of another religion. These are all fundamental concepts of our democracy, and it is absolutely the court's job to uphold them when challenged.
And the case law does exist (it's the one which just got overturned), so even if you were correct about the court's responsibility, then they just did the opposite of what you're purporting that responsibility to be.
