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.

> How is pregnancy not a personal circumstance?

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.

This is whataboutism. Just because people die in other unnecessary ways does not justify allowing them to die in a particular unnecessary way.

So you believe that doing the wrong thing for the right reason is better than doing the right thing for the wrong reason? That intent matters more than outcome? And that laws being structured in a way you specifically find compelling matters more than the morality of a law?

I think we can have some nuance here. As individuals I believe we have the leeway to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. But once we get to the level of government and acting in accordance with laws, I believe that acting for the right reasons (i.e. following the laws) is the only option that can lead to long term outcomes.

For the government to selectively follow laws, saying that in this case they don't apply since they don't give us the right result, makes a mockery of the very idea of having laws.

If we're speaking about what one should use as guiding principles, then it seems that if one acts for the "right" reasons, then that usually result in doing the right thing and only unusually results in doing the wrong thing.

Whereas if one acts for the "wrong" reasons, then that will only rarely result in doing the "right" thing.

One can look back at the original Roe v Wade and say "The right thing was done here, the outcome was good", but having that sort of consequentialist outlook tends to blind people to the downside of having the right things done for the wrong reasons- which is as we see here, those wrong reasons can in the future easily lead to the undoing of the right thing.

The original Roe v Wade decision meant that Congress never had to pass a law that explicitly nationally legalized abortion. If they had, the current situation wouldn't exist.

The Roe vs. Wade decision was the wrong way to solve the problem because it specifically set the stage for decades where the legislature didn't enshrine abortion as a right, and thus left it up for grabs to be taken back away only decades later. Ruth Bader Ginsburg argues that if Roe vs. Wade had been less sweeping, that the existing cultural movement in favor of women's rights would have naturally led to the protection of this right on a more fundamental and long lasting level.

Could you explain this a bit more please? (I'm not from the US so I'm possibly missing something but your comment is surprising at a broad strokes level)

Edit: I see you've edited your post already with a quote which is helpful.

The original Roe v Wade ruling, regardless of opinion on the outcome, was widely viewed as being based on a weak and poorly reasoned judicial argument. The risk of leaving defective judicial reasoning as precedent is that it enables a whole class of undesirable legal outcomes in the future unrelated to abortion. For this reason, it was expected that the Supreme Court would eventually fix this mistake. This ruling doesn't outlaw abortion, it merely moves it outside that court's jurisdiction and leaves it to other parts of government to decide.

I support this ruling for this reason even though I am against outlawing abortion.

It wasn't. This ruling is not about the constitution it's about power. Roe vs Wade was fine. This ruling is based on the fact that Republicans after decades got 6 extreme social conservatives on the court who decided they don't like Abortion

Sorry for the late edit.

I basically see people holding states more accountable now. State politicians who are pro-life are on notice. They can no longer cry about it and blame the federal government. The issue is now on their plate- and it's a thorny one. People need to vote.

But the Supreme Court just banned the rights of states to decide how they apply gun laws. Specifically, New York was prevented [days ago](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-gun-law-new-york-...) from deciding how concealed carry should be implemented.

Surely you can see the hypocrisy in only being in favour of state rights when it suits you.

You should read the actual opinion, and not the "summary" that this journalist put together. They didn't "ban the rights of states to decide how they apply gun laws". Simply that certain types of "may issue" permitting are at odds with 2A, because they deny Americans the exercise of an enumerated right for arbitrary reasons.

Permit Requester: I want to carry a pistol outside the home for self defense reasons.

Issuer: I don't believe your self defense claims are legitimate.

Requester: Why?

Issuer: I don't have to tell you.

SCOTUS enters the chat: This is no longer allowed.

There's a big difference in how you framed it, how that journalist framed it, and what actually happened. There is no hypocrisy here.

As much as it pains me to point this out, you cannot draw much of an analog between abortion and gun laws when it comes to states rights, because guns are protected by the Constitution very explicitly, abortion is not.

10th amendment

I think that it's more complicated than that. My take away was that NY gun laws allowed people to concealed carry with approval but were basically denying lawful approvals which ran afoul of the second amendment.

It ran around of the 14th amendment. Only people who donated money to the right politicians got approved for CCL. NY is still free to regulate handgun carry requirements, they just can't deny permits arbitrarily.

It isn't hypocrisy, because there is an amendment that says you have a right to a gun, and there isn't one that says you have a right to an abortion.

I'm not sure the political currents present in America today indicate that states won't eagerly trample the right's of their citizens. Especially considering the voting restrictions and minoritarian rule pet projects of the right.

America is also rife with examples of the federal government intervening to protect citizens from their states — Brown v Board, or most extremely the Civil War.

"People need to vote" is insufficient for regressions on issues that affect people's livelihoods. For example, Texas has a larger democrat-voting population than many blue states, "just voting" won't do anything to improve their livelyhood in the foreseeable future.

Are you at all concerned that now that this becomes a State level issue we move the wedge from a single federal level to 50 different wedges clogging up legislatures? We've been arguing about Roe for half a century, will this lead to resolution or is it a metastasization? Just an initial thought I had, even though I agree on all your points.

That sounds good in theory, but we know about the states where the republicans seemingly cannot be voted out of office - not helped by all their changes to the election system to prevent that. But indeed it would be ironic, if the public reaction to this were that strong so that a lot of red states turn blue. But I don't have too high hopes. Too many people in the whole spectrum don't see a ban of abortion affecting them while it is too easy to be "pro life".

Here is a thought: I'm a pro-choice New Englander. If those states like Kentucky are so strongly pro-life, then who am I to push my New England center/lib culture onto them?

It's liberating in a way- I don't need the whole country to subscribe to living like me or holding the same beliefs and that's okay.

To what extent are you willing to let other states restrict rights of US citizens because their cultural majority is different from yours? Is there a line? Perhaps 330 million people is too many to have in a single culture.

I am starting to come around to that view myself. The mythology of America has been dying for some time, and accelerating dramatically in the last few decades. Without that mythology to bind us together, it may be that we are more different than we thought. Arguably the majority of people in the southeast, for example, do not share the same values as people in the northwest. Maybe they should not try.

Our mythology has always been life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Freedom of speech and religion. Democracy. Rule of law. They aren't as radical and in vogue today but this was and still is our "mythology", IMO.

I think that's an idealized interpretation of a young country that spent it's first 100 years believing humanity is attached to skin color, fought a brutal civil war over that before spending its next 100 years preventing most of them from entering commerce, and its last ~50 years incarcerating as many of them as possible. And things like shadow wars in Cambodia do not look good on a country proclaiming "rule of law". So perhaps that's how you perceive it's shared methodology, but certainly not "how it has always been".

Mythology does not equal reality. It's a target to aim for. No countries "mythology" matches their reality.

My theory is not that mythology kept you together, but that there was enough cultural and physical space to peacefully ignore each other if anyone so wished, simply by moving a bit further away. Communications were slow enough that they could be digested or ignored more or less at will.

The problem is that, between natural population growth and the rise of the internet, both the cultural plane and the physical one have largely run out of space. Figurative "midwest zealots" just cannot live their lives ignoring "coastern heathens" even if they'd like to, and viceversa. And so the fights have broken out and will likely continue for a long time.

This is not a state issue or a cultural issue, it is an individual issue.

It does not matter what people in Kentucky think. They do not have the right to an opinion on another person's life decisions. Even if every person in Kentucky, or every person on the planet believed abortion is wrong, that would not impact an individual person's right to an abortion. Abortion is outside the scope of what governments can legitimately legislate, because individuals have sovereign control over their bodies.

> They do not have the right to an opinion on another person's life decisions.

The other side says that the fetus is a person with rights that are being trampled. And around and around we go forever. I am personally pro choice but I do understand that this is 100% my own subjective opinion.

> People need to vote.

Ahmen to that. We wouldn't be in this situation if liberals took voting as seriously as conservatives.

I've seen 100's of comments over the last year about how "I'm done voting because the student loans were not forgiven" ... I don't think the next period in America is going to go very well.

The problem is that even if abortion rights are re-established on stronger footing in the future, a whole lot of people are going to get hurt in the meantime.

I'm pro-choice as well and think this was the right decision. Roe created a Constitutional right that didn't exist. All this does today is correct that mistake.

As a big believer in states' rights, I"m glad to see more rights returned to their voters and legislatures. As was frequently told to me, "If you don't like it, you can move to another state." And I did.

Furthermore, this decision gets rid of the viability precedent so more extreme liberals states are now free to pass all the 3rd tri-mester up-until-the-moment-of-birth abortion laws they want, free of any potential legal challenges.

This gives states and their voters, the citizens, the people the right to choose. And I'm all for that.

And my criticism on RBG is she should've stepped down when Obama was in office instead of dying and giving Trump an appointee.

Ginsburg was an idealist.

do you think the supreme court did this because they share the same opinion as rbg? I think this Case was maybe a wonky solution for the Problem but it was the only one you Americans Had.

They definitely did not.

RBG thought that Roe v Wade won for the wrong reasons, but didn't want to repeal it because of the damage she knew it would cause – she wanted to roll-forward rather than roll-back.

This court, or at least the conservative majority, are very much in favour of rolling-back, and I suspect are only vaguely in favour of letting the legislature pass laws because they know that there will be challenges to those laws that they can then get involved in, meanwhile they have shifted the overton window of women's rights.

It's important to note that the idea that Roe was decided incorrectly, is a myth perpetuated by fedsoc and other reactionaries. And the liberal legal academics did nothing to counter it.

I am confused here. Are you saying these are all myths?

https://www.newsweek.com/ruth-bader-ginsburg-roe-wade-aborti...

https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/justice-ruth-bader-ginsbur...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/05/06/ruth-bader...

Seems to me RGB did feel that ruling was weak and should have decided based on equal protections not privacy.

Do you really think they wouldn't still overturn if it was decided based on equal protection? We should not fall into the trap of deifying the court. They are not above politics and they never have been.

And they didn't rule against it because of the privacy angle. They ruled against it because they are trying to destroy the jurisprudence of substantive due process and unenumerated rights, because it serves their reactionary politics.

To clarify, I think it was the right decision, for a weak but correct reason. Ideally it would have been decided for the reasons of bodily autonomy.

It’s not a myth.

Only if you buy in to the reactionary attack on substantive due process in general. And it's a mistake to think if Roe were decided any other way, that it still wouldn't have been overturned. Reactionaries do a great job of smuggling their politics as socially acceptable, fictional legal frameworks like textualism, even though they clearly abandon that whenever it is in conflict with their politics.