The Right Stuff: Supreme Court decision does not ban abortions

By Roger Oberbeck:Published July 4, 2022: Daily Republic

The Supreme Court of the United States’ ruling on Roe v Wade and Casey does not ban abortions. It returns the decision about abortions to the voting citizens of each state via their elected representatives.

The important part of the SCOTUS ruling is as follows: “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely – the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” That clause has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition and implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” The right to abortion does not fall in this category. Indeed, when the 14th Amendment was adopted, three quarters of the states made abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy. The abortion right is also critically different from any other rights that the courts held fall within the 1th Amendment’s protection of liberty. Roe’s defenders characterize the abortion right as similar to the rights recognized in past decisions involving matters such as intimate sexual relations, contraception and marriage. However, abortion is fundamentally different, as both Roe and Casey acknowledge, because it destroys what it called “fetal life” and what the law now describes as “unborn human being.”[...read more]