A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that Texas hospitals and doctors are not obligated to perform abortions under a longstanding national emergency-care law, dealing a blow to the White House’s strategy to ensure access to the procedure after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022.
“Some of you may die, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
Poor women.
But a prime example what failing to codify into law does. The pro choice lawmakers failed all these decades to actually create robust laws protecting women’s reproductive choice and health. Then Roe fell and there was nothing to hold back the hordes of Christian zealots waiting in the wings. Their intent was clear as some states even had trigger laws that would enact the moment Roe fell.
You see that now there is a scurry to create several laws that should curtail the president’s power, as certain limits existed based on decency, decorum and shame. Now that decency, decorum and shame no longer play a role in politics, only hard and explicit rules help.
They never did anything because roe was rock fucking solid!!! Scotus had to literally show how corrupt they were by completely ignoring the 9th and the 14th amendments. They basically completely destroyed 50 years of jurisprudence and literally lied in their Dobbs reasoning.
Stop pretending any fucking law on the books would have stopped these ghouls.
Except it wasn’t law, only jurisprudence. And many law scholars warned about the exact scenario that unfolded.
They ignored literal parts of the Constitution. How is another law going to stop that?
The Roe ruling was one based on a privacy argument that held up. A law explicitly enshrining these rights might have helped.
There are thousands of pages of legal analysis out there that break down how that should work. The goal would be to explicitly state these rights I stead of allowing interpretation by judges.
But laws are interpreted by the courts so a law passed by Congress would still be subject to their interpretation. In fact, even rights outlined in Constitutional amendments are interpreted by the courts. The best option would have been a constitutional amendment that was as specific as possible. However,
A) a constitutional amendment was not needed and should not have been required. The right to abortion was already codified in law and had a large pile of case law backing it up. Should we try to pass amendments for all the unenumerated rights? Do we need a state convention every time the courts rule in a way that establishes a new right?
B) Even that would not have stopped a court that had already made up its mind decades ago. They could have ruled that the new amendment violated the old ones and was void. They could have ruled it only protected abortion in rare cases, or that states rights are more important and overrule the right to abortion.
C) a constitutional amendment was never going to pass to requirements to become law. It would require a Dem supermajority in both chambers or Dem control of 2/3rds of states which is impossible with current gerrymandering.
Fundamentally we are looking at a whole party that would break any rule, law, or norm as long as it lets them do what they want. Establishing more rules or laws just gives them more things to break. The only party at fault here is them.
The courts don’t routinely invent entirely new rights whole cloth. It’s much, much more common to make rulings on exactly how already established rights apply in new or untested scenarios. Roe is one of those exceptions. Roe was weak legally, even if it was good from a policy standpoint.
No, it wasn’t. It was always just one bad decision away from crumbling, one that was always imminent because while it might be good policy, it was a bad decision from a legal standpoint. Any decision built on implied rights drawn from the shadows cast by other legal rights is inherently going to be on shaky ground, because determining what exactly those implied rights are is like reading tea leaves.
It doesn’t help that a lot of the arguments, positions and implied rights surrounding abortion seem to only apply in that context.
No, it wasn’t. There are plenty of areas in medical care and our personal medical decisions that somehow didn’t fall under these amendments.
It was not solid, which is why Dems kept promising for 50 years to codify it into law. They fucked around and women got screwed.
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I reject that way of describing my comment.
The heinous attack was already ongoing, with the trigger laws, rhetoric and actions (protesting abortion clinics is vile).
And the only legal recourse and opposition to these actions (that the US law protects) is by changing these laws.
You can stomp your feet all you want but the mother-killing christian nutbags that planned this scenario knew this, played the game, and won the last battle. Now women are paying the price.
So yes, lawmakers absolutely are to blame for not codifying into law the protection of reproductive choice. That does in no way mean that they are to blame for the vile actions of the pro-mother killing evangelicals, they can carry their own torch.
I want to add that your immediate attack on people that mostly align with your desired outcome will most likely alienate your would be allies instead of getting their help… Or maybe that is your plan.
Edit: and to be clear the victims are the women not the lawmakers.
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Jup so let’s stop arguing. We agree that women’s reproductive rights and right to bodily autonomy should be protected. I get your point, I just see that differently. There is value in also addressing the shortcomings of the defense that could have been used. Like with the military, analysis of failed defense learns lessons for future actions. But this definately does not change the goals, nor who the opposition is.
I didn’t read this as an attack, but criticism. On a state level there should be enough institutions, constitutions and other means to protect this type of laws against vile actors from within.
The states are the baddies in these cases unfortunately.
“The States” have been baddies since before the uniting.
And some, like mine, just never repealed the old law against it. No need to pass a trigger law when the old unenforceable abortion ban that’s literally older than the state can suddenly become enforceable.
EDIT: Surprised no one commented on the “literally older than the state” part. I’m in WV, our old abortion ban was carried over when we more or less imported Virginia’s criminal code wholesale when we broke off from Virginia to stay with the Union in the Civil War.
“some of you may die, but it’s the will of god.”
This ruling is literally this court overriding a law. It’s the first sentence if the summary. “A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that Texas hospitals and doctors are not obligated to perform abortions under a longstanding national emergency-care law,”
Can you, and everyone else, please stop with this ridiculous argument? It honestly might be one of the stupidest things said about abortion, and that’s saying something.
First, Republicans weren’t passing this, so you need Democratic control of the House, 60 votes in the Senate, and the presidency. So you’re down to about 70 days in the past 40 years when this could have happened.
Second, where does Congress get the authority to regulate abortion? Interstate Commerce? How are you circumventing the 10th amendment?
Lastly, why wouldn’t SCOTUS strike down this law when they overturned Roe? So they are willing to strike 50 years of judicial precedent, but not an act of Congress?
Your argument doesn’t make sense and you’re blaming the wrong people.