As has been anticipated for weeks now – ever since the leak from the US Supreme Court of a draft decision written by Justice Alito that overturned the infamous SCOTUS Roe v. Wade decision on abortion – the official ruling has been released that confirms the draft. Full opinion here. An excellent concision of it here.

The 1973 case that set US abortion policy across the nation, has been overturned. So too has its lesser known but equally important – some would say more important – 1992 decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Casey had already booted the trimester nonsense of Roe but kept in place the even more ridiculous notion that abortion derived from a right to privacy supposedly embedded in the 14th amendment, itself a result of an earlier SCOTUS ruling in the mid-1960’s.

Despite lasting for fifty years and seemingly settled in the minds of most US Liberals, the ruling was always on shaky ground with its talk of rights based on “penumbras”, – implied rights that could be glimpsed in parts of the US Bill of Rights as derived from other explicit rights. Almost from the moment the decision was made it was attacked by constitutional scholars, such as this Yale Law school paper from 1973, The Wages of Crying Wolf, which laid out the arguments for and against abortion but focused on the weakness of the privacy claim. The author of that paper appears to support the right to an abortion, and there have been other pro-abortion legal scholars who have, nevertheless, explained why Roe was such a weak, unconstitutional and plain bad law. Such people included none other than Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

She thought Roe v. Wade went too far. “Measured motions seem to me right, in the main, for constitutional as well as common law adjudication,” she argued. “Doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped, experience teaches, may prove unstable. The most prominent example in recent decades is Roe v. Wade.”

Ginsburg noted that Roe struck down far more than the specific Texas criminal abortion statute at issue in the case. “Suppose the court had stopped there, rightly declaring unconstitutional the most extreme brand of law in the nation, and had not gone on, as the court did in Roe, to fashion a regime blanketing the subject, a set of rules that displaced virtually every state law then in force,” she said. “A less encompassing Roe, one that merely struck down the extreme Texas law and went no further on that day, I believe and will summarize why, might have served to reduce rather than to fuel controversy.”

Ginsburg went on to contrast the court’s landmark decision in Roe with a slew of decisions from 1971 to 1982 in which the court struck down “a series of state and federal laws that differentiated explicitly on the basis of sex.” Rather than creating a new philosophy of law and imposing it on the nation immediately, “the court, in effect, opened a dialogue with the political branches of government…In essence, the court instructed Congress and state legislatures: rethink ancient positions on these questions,” Ginsburg noted. “The ball, one might say, was tossed by the justices back into the legislators’ court, where the political forces of the day could operate.”

It is this reasoning that has turned up in this decision, and exactly as Ginsburg stated, the ball has now been thrown back to the legislators, especially the State ones, and as my co-blogger GD explains, that does not mean it has been banned.

Some states will be hardline in both directions, others will find middle ground that their voters accept. I expect the Deep Blue parts of the nation like California, Illinois and New York, to promptly pass laws that widen abortion laws even further – perhaps as low as the standards of New Zealand, where anything goes – whereas others, especially Red States, will be more restrictive, although I don’t expect any of them to outright ban abortion. Even the Mississippi law that triggered this case allows abortions up to 15 weeks of pregnancy, which brings up this interesting factoid:

This is similar to other European countries, including Western Europeans like Sweden.

Of course now that the decision is back in the hands of politicians that’s going to mean a lot of problems for them – or at least for the principled ones.

However, as this article explains, other groups will no longer be able to hide behind “Law Of The Land” arguments and the fight either, like the US Roman Catholic Church:

For years, Supreme Court rulings like Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey allowed our leaders to hide. Republicans could campaign against it, rallying their base and decrying its injustice, then once in power make the excuse that, like it or not, Roe was “the law of the land.”

Democrats alike could claim they were personally against abortion, but believed it was up to the woman. Moreover, they didn’t need to vote much on the issue — it was already decided; it was “the law of the land.”

Even Catholic bishops could shirk confrontation, pointing to those politicians’ dodges and excuses, and hiding behind the same. No drastic action needed.

I’d like to think that the spineless fucks who lead the RC church nowadays might even consider excommunication for the likes of Nancy “Abortion is Sacred” Pelosi and Joe “Mass Every Sunday” Biden. Being a Catholic who quietly supports abortion is one thing: loudly proclaiming that you love and defend even its most extreme versions is something else. No principled person would remain in such a church, but of course Pelosi, Biden and other politicians have done so because they know there are (or were) millions of traditional working class Catholics who also religiously voted Democrat and loved being able to vote for Democrat Catholics – without thinking too much about how Catholic these frauds were.

Such nonsense was already changing before this ruling. Long gone are the days when liberals like Bill Clinton took the demure position that abortion was basically a necessary evil that should be “safe, legal, and rare”. Neither he nor any other recent Democrat president would dare take that position now. which is why Pelosi, Biden and other Democrat “Catholics” have basically stiffed the church while hiding behind its public garments.

The political and cultural brawl that is about to commence will be nasty – I often think that with Roe, SCOTUS was trying in good faith to avoid this, but it’s more like the similar screwup with the Dred Scott decision in 1857, thinking they had resolved the issue of slavery – but it will likely be less Federal than at the State level. That’s because the Democrats have held off putting Roe and Casey into Federal legislation over the last fifty years, even when they had big majorities, because it is still so controversial with their own voters – and again because they could hide behind the SCOTUS decisions.

No longer:

Lenin allegedly said, “There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” He was supposedly discussing the Bolshevik Revolution, but the saying could be applied to America’s growing turmoil at home, too.
…
Ever upward is the only path liberal government permits, which is why the repeal of Roe would be devastating. “Our democracy,” as they call it, depends not only on never turning back the clock of social reform, but never even admitting such a thing is possible. Even if, as is likely, almost half the states would enact abortion regimes as permissive as, or even more permissive than, the current one, the game would be up. The nature of such modern rights would be exposed, unforgettably. It would be, as the liberals fear, a kind of revolution.

Which is why they have little choice but to object not merely to the leaked decision and the brave justices who support it, but to the whole system…. Prepare for decades to happen in the next year or so of our politics, as the battle between the progressives’ constitution and the founders’ Constitution intensifies.

That was written just after the leak happened, and we’ve already seen what was directed at the key Justices, with attempted protests outside their homes – illegal actually but not enforced by Biden’s politicised DOJ of course – plus attempted an assassination and implied threats of such.

The Democrats are not helping themselves with crap like that, or this:

Representative Bishop followed up [with abortion activist Aimee Arrambide ], “Do you believe then that men can become pregnant and have abortions?” She had those eyes — the ones that make you know you’re going to get an answer that you’re going to regret. “Yes,” she declared.

Party of science did you say? I also can’t wait for the whole My Body, My Choice argument to re-appear, shamelessly so in the wake of vaccine mandates pushed relentlessly by many Democrats.

The protests are already on the way with the Nights of Rage, and given the arsons and attacks that have already been made on dozens of Catholic churches and pro-life pregnancy clinics I’ve no doubt that there are going to be even more:

Brace for impact.

However, it should also be noted that the SCOTUS leak of this ruling, undoubtedly done to try and intimidate the Court and gin up Democrat voters for the up-coming Mid-Term elections, failed on both counts. Yes, there have been protests, but they have not been very large, have consisted of little more than the White Liberal Woman demographic, and have not shifted the issue up the scale in polls of voters over the last month.

I doubt the next wave will be any more successful, though I’m also sure the MSM will amplify it as much as possible to make it seem that way.