Roe vs Wade vs SCOTUS legitimacy

[Sociopathicsteelerfan]

(05-03-2022, 09:37 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: In what way is it not close? The right to liberty is one of the bedrocks of our system and criminalizing abortion is the government denying that right to a person capable of giving birth. It denies them their liberty without any test regarding public safety or any due process. The 14th Amendment then requires states to protect the rights of all of their citizens in the same way the federal government is required to do. What this means is that under the 14th, no state should be allowed to deny an individual of their liberties without due process. Criminalization of abortion absolutely does that. That's very black and white.

If I were playing Devil's advocate, which I pretty much am in this thread, I'd argue that you're starting from a false assumption.  That being that abortion is an inherent right.  It's not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, nor is birth control.  Couching it as a right or a given liberty is starting from a flawed assumption as it's clearly not delineated anywhere.  Now, the Roe argument that it falls under the 14th has some merit, but as I said, it's hardly a perfect fit, and it's nowhere near as clear as a right given to some people, e.g. marriage, which is being denied to others.  Now, I would assume your counter argument is that some states will restrict and some will not, hence creating what I just stated, a right for some but not others.  The problem with that is that "settled law", and we need look no further than the 2A to find this, is that states are permitted to restrict rights within certain limits.  Eliminating Roe would punt it back to the states and set up a whole new round of legal wrangling on the limits of said restrictions.

But at the end of the day framing abortion as a right under the 14th was a stretch, and it should have given Congress enough time to actually pass a law codifying abortion into federal law.  Except they didn't.  They sat on their hands and relied on one judicial ruling to shore up their entire position.  This is not only a poor strategy it's a lazy one.