Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights per draft opinion (Update: Dobbs opinion official) (1 Viewer)

[LovesMusic7360]

Not long ago Kari Lake proclaimed Arizona's abortion law was a great law and wanted it the law of the state.

Now that she has gotten her way, she is lobbying for it to be repealed.

As I have been saying since 2022, the overwhelming vast majority of women aren't going to vote for the man who proudly boasts that he got rid of Roe V. Wade. Nor are those women going to vote for a forced birther politician.

Turns out, republican belief in "pro life" was all just lies to get votes. Who is surprised? I sure am not.

How many forced birthers will do the same about face?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/ka ... r-BB1ltx3I.

Arizona Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake is actively lobbying state lawmakers to overturn a 160-year-old law she once supported that bans abortion in almost all cases, a source with knowledge of her efforts told CNN.

 

[porculator]

This is why I can't stand "Old" mentality or "boomer" mentality as the kids would call it today. Instead of thinking big picture, a 1950's mindset is being presented here. Left out of the conversation is always the possibility of cheap, effective, male birth control options. If the idea is to limit abortions, this would be an effective way to stop unwanted pregnancies. If the woman has an "oopsie" moment due to forgetting to take her birth control, the male still has his own protection or vice versa if the male forgets his. In order for a kid to be born, both would have to drop their contraceptives to make it happen.

I don't know a single man who is sexually active that wouldn't take that pill if it existed. Now I assume if such a pill existed for men, conservatives would shame those men by saying they're "not real men" for taking it because they're "avoiding their god given responsibility to raise families."

But we can't have that, we can't for some reason have next level thinking using modern solutions to older problems. Investing into and offering the other half of the human race effective, safe, birth control technology would do more to prevent abortions than both sides screeching over the for or against issue that has literally us nowhere. You can't tell me we, as humans, aren't smart enough to make this a thing. While there is no perfect solution, its a far better approach than the one we have now.

The problem is that the most active voices on the topic fall into two extremes.
Far Right : Abortion is bad. Contraception is also bad
Far Left : Abortion is OK for any reason and how dare you suggest that anyone should ever have mixed feelings over the morality and frequency of it.

The fact is that the numbers are consistently going down, because of successful contraception, and the left should be shouting this from the hills at every chance and encouraging more solutions like the man-pill. But they are afraid to offend their hyper-sensitive base by celebrating the decline and as such implying that there is a problem with the frequency of them in the first place.

 

[samiam5211]

I just want to say that this is hitting at the worst possible time with all the Tucker Carlson viewers upping their sperm counts with testicle tanning.

 

[Incumbent]

How can you be so confident in anything that this court will do to restrict or not restrict abortions? I mean, they're currently allowing bounties in Texas against people seeking abortions. I have not such confidence with the erosion of personal rights that is ongoing.

It's time to assume the worst from American conservatism. The future they have set up for this country is bleak and getting worse. Their policies have led to a heavily armed population and they have fomented distrust, hatred, and division through religious ideology and culture wars. They are gerrymandering districts and manipulating governments and procedures to prop up their grasp on power.

Attacks on women's rights are just one front. The theocracy of their base compels them to go after anything that isn't in line with their beliefs, and serves as an effective means to fortify their attacks on democracy and on "others".

It isn't irrational to be fearful of their motives and objectives when their tactics and rhetoric are so transparent and appalling. We didn't get here by accident.

 

[J-DONK]

The problem is that the most active voices on the topic fall into two extremes.
Far Right : Abortion is bad. Contraception is also bad
Far Left : Abortion is OK for any reason and how dare you suggest that anyone should ever have mixed feelings over the morality and frequency of it.

The fact is that the numbers are consistently going down, because of successful contraception, and the left should be shouting this from the hills at every chance and encouraging more solutions like the man-pill. But they are afraid to offend their hyper-sensitive base by celebrating the decline and as such implying that there is a problem with the frequency of them in the first place.

It's strange to hear dinosaurs like Joe Manchin make some drug fueled parent rant back when he axed the CTC. The truth is no one wants to have kids anymore. African-Americans fell below replacement birth rates a decade ago.

I find it highly immoral for the state to force a woman to have a child in a country with no maternity leave, or free healthcare.

 

[DJ1BigTymer]

It's time to assume the worst from American conservatism. The future they have set up for this country is bleak and getting worse. Their policies have led to a heavily armed population and they have fomented distrust, hatred, and division through religious ideology and culture wars. They are gerrymandering districts and manipulating governments and procedures to prop up their grasp on power.

Attacks on women's rights are just one front. The theocracy of their base compels them to go after anything that isn't in line with their beliefs, and serves as an effective means to fortify their attacks on democracy and on "others".

It isn't irrational to be fearful of their motives when their tactics and rhetoric are so transparent and appalling. We didn't get here by accident.

It's past the time to assume the worst from them!

It began in 2008 when McConnel applied the Gingrich model to the Senate, forever breaking the Senate. Before then, compromise and actual smart legislation was still was within the realm of possibility because the Senate still had intelligent people in their chambers. Today, those chambers are full of ideological zealots and idiots that cater to the lowest common denominators within their base.

 

[superchuck500]

I’ll defer to your knowledge of the details on how we get there, but I feel pretty confident in the outcome, though it will obviously be years before something like this can play out.

Remember the thread about Trump never leaving? Well, you won the first round, but I’d hardly say the bout is over there, either.

Which outcome are you referring to? I feel pretty confident about Obergefell but I'd have to concede that it's not outlandish that a state would pass a new marriage law that allows only opposite-sex marriage and that law could be upheld, reversing Obergefell. I think it's unlikely but I can't say it's unrealistic.

The Supreme Court declaring that abortion is murder to reach a result upholding restriction on travel between the states that effectively outlaws abortion in the United States is a scenario against which I would make a substantial wager. There isn't even a federal statute that defines murder for the nation because it's a question left to the states based on notions of federalism (the federal government exercises only the powers granted to it by the Constitution, leaving all other power to the states) that are confirmed in the 10th Amendment. So while there is a federal statute defining federal murder, it applies to only those limited areas of federal criminal jurisdiction (e.g. murder on a military base, murder of a federal officer, etc.).

The Court has consistently upheld this distinction and in modern times famously rejected the notion that constitutional interstate-commerce power in the federal government gives Congress police power over the general activities within a state, where some aspect of the crime may involve interstate commerce (the Lopez case, where a federal statute prohibiting guns in schools was found unconstitutional because there simply was not a sufficient connection to federal constitutional authority). So if Congress couldn't even define abortion as criminal murder in the United States, the Supreme Court certainly can't do it on its own in decision reviewing a state prohibition on travel to obtain an abortion. It's just fundamentally not how it works.

That ends the discussion for the scenario that was presented - but while we're at it, we can talk more generally about the freedom of movement question. The idea is that a state tries to limit (by making it illegal) its residents from going to other states to get abortions. This raises fundamental questions of state criminal jurisdiction and the privileges and immunities clause in Article IV (which, along with the 14th Amendment, shapes the "freedom of movement" right in America). It is basic that a state only has criminal jurisdiction over activity within the confines of the state - so state A can't say that activity in state B is a crime in state A, there's just no jurisdiction to do that. Further, the privileges and immunities clause provides that a citizen of one state shall be entitled to any privileges and immunities of another state while in that other state. Ergo, if abortion is legal in California, a resident of Texas is legal in getting an abortion in California. Though abortion is illegal in Texas, Texas only has criminal jurisdiction to prosecute crimes that occur in Texas. Texas lacks jurisdiction to declare conduct in California to be criminal, even if the person participating in the conduct is a Texas resident.

And outlawing going to California in the first place to get an abortion attempts an end run around the territorial limits of state criminal jurisdiction by restricting free movement on the basis that the person is seeking to engage in that conduct . . . but the conduct is legal in California, which brings us back to the privileges and immunities clause. It begins to get circular but states simply don't have that kind of criminal jurisdiction. Of course we know they're going to try it and it will have to be resolved, but I just don't see how it can be reconciled with the constitutional text and long-standing (centuries) Supreme Court case law.

 

[zztop]

time to break out the annual quote of:

"I do not believe that just because you are opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, a child educated, a child housed. And why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is."

Sr. Joan Chittister


(She was interviewed in 2019 and still stands behind her statement)

Sr. Joan Chittister's 2004 quote on 'pro-life' versus 'pro-birth' goes viral

A recent Instagram post earned supermodel Gigi Hadid nearly a half a million likes, but it wasn't a photo of herself or of the latest fashion ...

www.ncronline.org

 

[brandon]

The Supreme Court declaring that abortion is murder to reach a result upholding restriction on travel between the states that effectively outlaws abortion in the United States is a scenario against which I would make a substantial wager.

You don't need the court to declare that abortion is murder. You merely need them to determine that a fetus has the right to life. Then the 14th amendment comes into play where they are being deprived the right to life without due process of law, and bam, abortion is unconstitutional.

That was a wild leap two days ago. Today, that's easily the next step.

 

[Taurus]

The problem is that the most active voices on the topic fall into two extremes.
Far Right : Abortion is bad. Contraception is also bad
Far Left : Abortion is OK for any reason and how dare you suggest that anyone should ever have mixed feelings over the morality and frequency of it.

The fact is that the numbers are consistently going down, because of successful contraception, and the left should be shouting this from the hills at every chance and encouraging more solutions like the man-pill. But they are afraid to offend their hyper-sensitive base by celebrating the decline and as such implying that there is a problem with the frequency of them in the first place.

Nope. They aren't pushing it because nobody should have to justify evicting an unwanted guest living inside your very body. Does a woman have to legally justify saying "Stop" during sex...even if your Johnson is fully embedded? No, she doesn't. The same principle applies to pregnancy. Things change. Consent on Day 1 doesn't mean consent is forever granted any more than it is to a guy during sex.
If Conservatives really wanted to uphold their alleged principles, they'd be advocating for research into artificial wombs. Such an invention would satisfy all parties with maximum freedom for all involved.
But that's not what they really want.

What this Court deliberately ignores is the fact that we don't have such rights as are enumerated in the Constitution. The various Amendments merely address those rights considered important enough to the concept of being a free citizen or how rights like voting are to be exercised. What we have is ALL the rights not specifically enumerated as well as those that are.

 

[superchuck500]

You don't need the court to declare that abortion is murder. You merely need them to determine that a fetus has the right to life. Then the 14th amendment comes into play where they are being deprived the right to life without due process of law, and bam, abortion is unconstitutional.

That was a wild leap two days ago. Today, that's easily the next step.

Ah fair enough, I misread your first post.

Your premise is the Supreme Court declaring that a fetus is a person for purposes of the 14th Amendment. I don't know, I'm sure there's some good reading on that question and the principles that apply to it.

It's an interesting question. My gut is that they wouldn't do it on their own, but given the right statute before them, I could see something like that happening. Sorry for the confusion on my part.

 

[superchuck500]

lol

 

[Optimus Prime]

I don't know a single man who is sexually active that wouldn't take that pill if it existed. Now I assume if such a pill existed for men, conservatives would shame those men by saying they're "not real men" for taking it because they're "avoiding their god given responsibility to raise families."

Posted this in the other thread
========================


Women didn’t exactly rush into the streets to celebrate the news last month that an improved contraceptive pill for men is in the works.

We’ve been waiting for men to help solve this problem for decades, so please forgive our skepticism.

First, we laughed at the idea of men taking any kind of medication that causes temporary infertility. And then we cried because we remembered that men will never be good at birth control until they can get pregnant.

Certainly, there has never been a better time for people with testes to step up and take some responsibility for contraception. According to a recent U.N. report, half of all pregnancies on our overcrowded planet are unintended. A male contraceptive could, if approved, reduce abortions and child poverty.

And in the United States, a pill for men should have more relevance now that access to abortion is being rapidly curtailed in many states.

The new male contraceptive works by targeting a specific protein important for cell growth, including sperm formation. Inhibiting this protein dramatically reduces sperm counts, and reportedly it is 99 percent effective.

And while the compound has only been tested on mice, there are no observable side effects so far. Four to six weeks after the mice stopped receiving the compound; they were able to father pups again. Human trials are planned for this fall.

Until that occurs, we have time to tackle a foundational issue or two. Let’s start with the big one: What exactly could entice the average guy to take a daily pill that does something mysterious to his sperm?

This might be the world’s greatest advertising challenge. “Temporary sterility” will never be an easy sell to an audience that is accustomed to being served up all kinds of marketing hustles for trucks, beverages and screen time that play to their masculinity. The only way you’d get guys to take that contraceptive pill, a male friend remarked, is if it also gives them an erection……

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/21/xx/

 

[Optimus Prime]

On CNN either last night or this morning they had someone on who said that other countries have implemented abortion bans

And in those countries the number of abortions did not go down, but the number of women dying went up because they were getting unsafe procedures done by unqualified people, or trying to do it themselves

 

[Optimus Prime]

More on Collins and Murkowski
=========================

The stunning leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion indicating that the federal constitutional right to abortion may be on the cusp of evaporating has brought new and intense scrutiny to two prominent Republican supporters of abortion rights, Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), who provided key Senate support to justices who now appear poised to overturn Roe v. Wade.


Both women voted for Supreme Court justices nominated by former president Donald Trump, explaining that they were convinced through public and private statements that those nominees would respect existing court precedent and leave Roe in place.

On Tuesday, both suggested that if in fact the court moves to overturn the decision in sweeping terms — as the leaked draft opinion signed by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. would indicate — it would represent a breach of those prior assurances……

Murkowski, who voted for Gorsuch and Barrett but not for Kavanaugh, would not comment on particular conversations she has had with the nominees in comments to reporters on Tuesday.

But she expressed dismay at both the leak and the possibility that Roe’s days could be numbered.


“We don’t know the direction that this decision may ultimately take,” she said. “But if it goes in the direction that this leaked copy has indicated, I will just tell you that it rocks my confidence in the court right now.”……

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/03/murkowski-collins-roe-abortion-opinion/

 

[coldseat]

This is extremely on point and accurate. The court has really corrupted itself.

Here’s some history to put it in context. In 1987, in a case called Booth v. Maryland, the Supreme Court decided that in death penalty cases, prosecutors could not put on the witness stand family and friends of victims of homicide victims, because who was killed, and how many people loved that person, should not determine the fate of the killer. The vote was 5 to 4.

Four years later, in Payne v. Tennessee, the Supreme Court reversed itself, letting this evidence in. What changed? Nothing, except the membership of the court. In an outraged dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote, “Power, not reason, is the new currency of this Court’s decision making. … Neither the law nor the facts supporting Booth and Gathers underwent any change in the last four years. Only the personnel of this Court did.”

That’s what is about to happen in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — a Mississippi abortion case before the court — assuming the draft opinion remains substantially the same when it is handed down. The facts supporting Roe and Casey aren’t different; the law that governs the case has not changed or proved unworkable. Yes, there are many people who disagree with the law, albeit far from a majority of the country. But the minority manipulated the system of appointing Supreme Court justices, willing to do whatever it took to get the votes to overrule Roe. What happened next is not a change in the rectitude of the legal principles but in the identity of those who articulated them.

It was a decades-long project that happened slowly until it happened quickly. Time after time, those opposed to Roe failed in their attempts to seat jurists who would overturn it, because appointee after appointee — Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy, David Souter, even Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — failed to pull the ripcord when the moment arrived. So, when Justice Antonin Scalia died while Barack Obama was president, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took the truly unprecedented step of sitting on a nomination for months, until Donald Trump was elected and Neil M. Gorsuch was named to the court. Then, the Republican right, again ruling without a majority of the country in support, got Brett M. Kavanaugh through the Senate. And finally, Amy Coney Barrett apparently was the straw that may break Roe’s back, confirmed mere days before the 2020 election, after voting had already begun. If, as Politico’s reporting suggests, this result in Dobbs is 5 to 4, it was only possible because of each and all of these maneuvers. Do not mistake principled decision-making for what in reality is the opportunistic and intensely partisan manipulation of circumstance.

So Roe will fall. Countless women will have their lives irreparably altered. Efforts to dress up this opinion as sober constitutional and historical reflection fall flat precisely because of the sneering contempt shown for both Roe and the many, many judges who left it undisturbed. This is a political opinion from a political court, one that doesn’t pretend to be anything else.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/03/supreme-court-abortion-leak-politics-law-overturn-roe/

 

[Optimus Prime]

This could go in a few threads
=======================

In the immediate fallout of the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would strike down Roe v. Wade, many have noted that this decision will be extremely unpopular; polls show that between 60 and 65 percent of Americans say Roe should remain.

The draconian laws Republicans are already proposing at the state level could be even more unpopular.


But if those facts allowed liberals to convince themselves this day would not come, they were clearly misguided. The coming nightmare for reproductive rights is in large part a product of minority rule.

It’s what Republicans have painstakingly constructed over the course of decades, and it might take just as long to dismantle it — if Democrats can do that at all.
Opinions on abortion have been remarkably resistant to change for the past 50 years.

The antiabortion movement’s attempt to convince the public that abortion is murder was a failure, and that likely won’t change in the post-Roe world.

Conservatives know that perfectly well. But the whole point of building the apparatus of minority rule was for moments like this.

You don’t have to twist the system in knots and eliminate democratic accountability to do popular things. You do it to stop popular things you don’t like, enable yourself to do things the public doesn’t want, and hold on to power no matter what.


The details should be familiar by now. The Senate gives two votes to every state, so 40 million Americans in California, most of them Democrats, get the same representation as 580,000 Americans in Wyoming, most of them Republicans.

That is then levered into the electoral college, which is why the past two Republican presidents took office despite having lost the popular vote.

That (plus unprecedented ruthlessness in refusing to allow a Democratic president to fill an open seat) gets you a conservative Supreme Court supermajority — appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, confirmed by GOP senators who represent a national minority — enacting a conservative legal revolution the public never asked for…….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/03/minority-rule-roe-v-wade-is-dead/

 

[MT15]

This doesn’t change my view about the likelihood that Obergefell would be overturned.

So a person on Twitter, an author and fellow at a think tank, says she has been told the plan for right wingers includes this: after the ruling on Roe is official, so July-August, Ken Paxton, AG of TX will say that he doesn’t believe that Obergefell applies to TX, and so it will begin wending it’s way through the courts, to ultimately end up in the SC.

I also heard an interview on the radio of a local protester who has been picketing a local abortion provider for decades. She asked him what he would do with his free time, and he didn’t miss a beat: we are going to move on to same sex marriage.

So, I don’t have the faith you have in these justices.

 

[coldseat]

What in the crack-pipe rationalization is this? Republican woman really are the worst!

On the heels of a new Florida law banning abortions after 15 weeks without exceptions for rape, state Sen. Ileana Garcia said last week that denying abortions to human-trafficking victims can help them escape captors who won’t want to sell them for sex while they are pregnant.

The Republican lawmaker’s comments were highlighted in a CBS Miami report on Sunday, one day before Politico reported that the Supreme Court had voted, according to a draft opinion, to overturn Roe v. Wade, the case that established the right to abortion nearly 50 years ago.

Garcia made the comments last week at a public meeting in Miami Beach after being asked why she did not support an exception to Florida’s new 15-week abortion ban for victims of rape, incest or human trafficking.

“When the girl or the woman gets pregnant, and they can’t make her get an abortion, or she doesn’t want to get an abortion, or they can’t get her to a place to get an abortion, they don’t use her anymore,” Garcia told the crowd. “So, they release her from the human trafficking ring. That is why we went to that point.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/03/florida-senator-abortion-sex-trafficking/