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This is distressing: A Nebraska woman is facing felony charges for helping her teenage daughter obtain an abortion earlier this year. Her daughter, who was 17 years-old at the time and 22 weeks pregnant (abortion is illegal in the state after 20 weeks), is also being charged. She will be tried as an adult. I’m looking to get more details on the case, but a couple of noteworthy items: Law enforcement not only went through the girl’s medical records, but got a warrant for her Facebook messages. That’s where the mother and daughter allegedly talked about how to properly take abortion medication—the prosecutor is also using a message where the teen expressed not wanting to be pregnant as evidence.
Congress is comparatively easy. Getting 3/4 of states to ratify it is the real challenge.Code for: we've done it 27 times, it's only impossible when the Congress is deadlocked by partisan bickering.
That is by design. Consitutional amendment is not meant as an inexpensive political football, it should only happen where there is significant consensus as to the necessity.Any controversial amendment will have a snowball's chance in a blast furnace of getting ratified.
Yes, one does not want it to be too easy, but the US Constitution is one of the most difficult to amend of nations' constitutions. US state constitutions are usually much easier to amend.That is by design. Consitutional amendment is not meant as an inexpensive political football, it should only happen where there is significant consensus as to the necessity.Any controversial amendment will have a snowball's chance in a blast furnace of getting ratified.
Also true. But, there are historical reasons for that.Yes, one does not want it to be too easy, but the US Constitution is one of the most difficult to amend of nations' constitutions. US state constitutions are usually much easier to amend.That is by design. Consitutional amendment is not meant as an inexpensive political football, it should only happen where there is significant consensus as to the necessity.Any controversial amendment will have a snowball's chance in a blast furnace of getting ratified.
Americans overwhelmingly would like to be able to vote on an abortion measure on their state ballot, an exclusive USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds. And if they had the chance, they would oppose efforts to ban the procedure by almost 2-1.
The survey, taken in the aftermath of the stunning defeat in Kansas last week of a proposal to remove abortion rights from the state constitution, is more evidence of a backlash to the Supreme Court's decision that allows states to sharpen restrictions on abortion or bar it entirely.
More:Kansas abortion vote raises warning signs for GOP nationwide in November.
Seven in 10 say they would support using a ballot measure to decide abortion rights in their state, an idea backed across party lines, by 73% of Democrats, 77% of Republicans and 67% of independents. Democrats are the most energized on the issue; 43% say they "strongly support" putting abortion on the ballot.
If there were a ballot measure in their state, those polled would vote by 54%-28% in favor of making abortion legal. Democrats support legal abortion in their state by 7-1 (76%-10%) and independents by 2-1 (52%-27%). Among Republicans, 34% would support abortion rights and 54% would oppose them, a worrisome fissure for the party that has long been identified with the anti-abortion movement.
At particular risk for the GOP are two groups of swing voters. Suburbanites by 56%-26% say they would vote to support abortion rights in a ballot measure. And women by 60%-25% would support an abortion rights initiative, significantly more than the backing among men of 47%-32%.
Like what?Also true. But, there are historical reasons for that.Yes, one does not want it to be too easy, but the US Constitution is one of the most difficult to amend of nations' constitutions. US state constitutions are usually much easier to amend.That is by design. Consitutional amendment is not meant as an inexpensive political football, it should only happen where there is significant consensus as to the necessity.Any controversial amendment will have a snowball's chance in a blast furnace of getting ratified.
Like what?
NotingThough the constitutional law of “religious liberty” is a murky and ever-developing field, we are all accustomed to hearing anguished claims from conservative Christians that laws requiring them to provide or pay for reproductive-health services or treat LGBTQ employees and customers equally are an unacceptable violation of their beliefs. Now that the Supreme Court has struck down the federal right to an abortion, it’s clearer than ever that the Christian right and its Republican allies are aiming to construct a system where they are free to live their values as they wish, regardless of the impact on others.
But as a new lawsuit in Florida shows, what’s good for the conservative goose may also be good for the progressive gander.
Gov. Ron DeSantis is a Catholic.When the Rev. Laurie Hafner ministers to her Florida congregants about abortion, she looks to the founding values of the United Church of Christ, her lifelong denomination: religious freedom and freedom of thought. She taps into her reading of Genesis, which says “man became a living being” when God breathed “the breath of life” into Adam. She thinks of Jesus promising believers full and abundant life.
“I am pro-choice not in spite of my faith, but because of my faith,” Hafner says.
She is among seven Florida clergy members — two Christians, three Jews, one Unitarian Universalist and a Buddhist — who argue in separate lawsuits filed Monday that their ability to live and practice their religious faith is being violated by the state’s new, post-Roe abortion law. The law, which is one of the strictest in the country, making no exceptions for rape or incest, was signed in April by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), in a Pentecostal church alongside antiabortion lawmakers such as the House speaker, who called life “a gift from God.”
All i can say is: where have they been? They've let the Religious Right be the public face of their religion.The lawsuits are at the vanguard of a novel legal strategy arguing that new abortion restrictions violate Americans’ religious freedom, including that of clerics who advise pregnant people. The cases are part of an effort among a broad swath of religious Americans who support abortion access to rewrite the dominant modern cultural narrative that says the only “religious” view on abortion is to oppose it.
“The religious right has had the resources and the voices politically and socially to be so loud, and frankly, they don’t represent the Christian faith,” Hafner told The Washington Post. “Those of us on the other side, with maybe a more inclusive voice, need to be strong and more faithful and say: ‘There is another very important voice.’
“Look biblically; Jesus says nothing about abortion. He talks about loving your neighbor and living abundantly and fully. He says: ‘I come that you might have full life.’ Does that mean for a 10-year-old to bear the child of her molester? That you cut your life short because you aren’t able to rid your body of a fetus?”
Along with“Since time immemorial, the questions of when a potential fetus or fetus becomes a life and how to value maternal life during pregnancy have been answered according to religious beliefs and creeds,” say the suits, which use identical language except when describing each plaintiff’s faith.
The new law, the suits read, sets “a pernicious elevation of the legal rights of fetuses while at the same time it devalues the quality of life and the health of the woman or girl who is pregnant. It is in direct conflict with Plaintiff’s clerical obligations and faith and imposes severe barriers and substantial burdens to their religious belief, speech and conduct.”
In effect, religious freedom only for kinds of religion that they like.Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and an authority on religious-freedom law, said states and the Supreme Court could curtail the efforts among faith leaders who support abortion rights by arguing that there is a “compelling government interest” in protecting fetal life. And the right kind of compelling government interest can be an exception to most constitutional rights, he explained.
“For better or worse, a compelling government interest is whatever five justices say it is,” Laycock said. “It’s a matter of judicial interpretation, not legislative enactment. And pretty clearly, we have six justices who would happily say that the state’s interest in fetal life is compelling” and outweighs the free exercise of religion.
Plus, Laycock said, the justices wouldn’t have taken the monumental step of overturning Roe v. Wade only to turn around and allow “an alternate route to choice, an enormous loophole, or even a small loophole.”
“They may like free exercise, but they oppose abortion more,” he said.
Fundamentally, there was a fear that the states, though "united" against foreign domination, were not truly equal to one another in power, wealth, and influence. You see an anxiety concerning domination by other states written into the Constitutional structure at several points, most powerfully the composition of the Senate, the requirements for constitutional amendment, the Tenth amendment itself, and we could have discussion about several other points here. It's important to keep in mind that the writing of the Consitution was itself a somewhat sketchy affair, overthrowing for all intents and purposes the government originally set up by the Revolutionaries. In that government, guided by the Articles of Confederation, states exercised much more liberally interpreted rights over their own affairs, but this also allowed the manipulation and abuse of smaller states by their more powerful neighbors. The first adopted draft of the US Constitution is a masterwork of compromise, creating a vastly more powerful federal government but using a complex system of checks and balances to keep it functional.Like what?Also true. But, there are historical reasons for that.Yes, one does not want it to be too easy, but the US Constitution is one of the most difficult to amend of nations' constitutions. US state constitutions are usually much easier to amend.That is by design. Consitutional amendment is not meant as an inexpensive political football, it should only happen where there is significant consensus as to the necessity.Any controversial amendment will have a snowball's chance in a blast furnace of getting ratified.
"Keep your rosaries off our ovaries!"Analysts were quick to frame the result as a setback for the antiabortion movement, but activists and experts say it also amounts to a rejection of the Catholic Church hierarchy, which had shelled out massive sums of money in support of the amendment’s passage. The vote may hint, too, at a mounting backlash against the church’s involvement in the nation’s abortion debate — not least among Catholics themselves.
Boo hoo hoo hoo hooIn the wake of the vote, Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, who publicly supported the amendment’s passage, issued a statement Wednesday lamenting its failure.
“We were not able to overcome the millions spent by the abortion industry to mislead Kansans about the amendment, nor the overwhelming bias of the secular press whose failure to report clearly on the true nature of the amendment served to advance the cause of the abortion industry,” Naumann wrote.
Then getting into fetal personhood, including personhood since when the father's sperm goes into the mother's egg.I am really thrilled to have a piece in the issue about IVF in a post-Roe limbo — how providers and patients alike are scared and uncertain about the future, how anti-abortion laws may make it much harder for people to start or expand their families, and how that’s shaping care and reproductive decision-making today.
As author Jill Filipovic says, "That doesn’t really make sense — unless the whole point is to control women, and not to protect fertilized eggs."IVF complicates this. When Alabama passed a law criminalizing abortion and purporting to protect embryos, some objected because of concerns about IVF. If a fertilized egg is a person, the argument went, then IVF as it is currently practiced becomes either illegal or highly legally risky in a state that imbues a fertilized egg with a full set of rights. But Alabama state legislator Clyde Chambliss had an answer: “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.”
In other words, fertilized eggs are only people if they are inside of a woman.
She then notes what an awkward dilemma IVF poses to anti-abortionists.Today, roughly two in every 100 babies born in the US was conceived with the aid of reproductive technology. Those numbers are higher in areas where women have higher levels of education and have children later.
I’ve written before about how virtually no one — not even self-identified pro-lifers — actually believes that a fertilized egg is a person.
I was, too. I really didn't think they would go this far.It seems to me that the Biden Admin was caught flat-footed by the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe vs. Wade.
Stare decisis - "to stand by what was decided"For more than a decade, the Court has issued narrow rulings, decided by slim majorities, that align with Republican political goals. Five Justices unleashed dark money in politics. They gutted the Voting Rights Act. They pulled the rug out from under public-sector unions. In that sense, Dobbs—the decision overturning Roe—is part of a larger trend.
But the American public is right to see Dobbs as different. Not just because of the decision’s impact, or the outrage it’s caused. More than a radical opinion, Dobbs represents a radical new approach to interpreting the Constitution. If left unchecked, the justices’ decision could mark not just the end of Roe, but the upending of America’s system of checks and balances.
Clarence Thomas rejects stare decisis, while the other court conservatives profess to uphold it.Stare decisis does not bind judges’ hands entirely. It does, however, restrain them. When the Court’s majority feels a past case was wrongly decided, it is expected to rule narrowly instead of broadly, chipping away at old precedents and only gradually establishing new ones. It’s the legal equivalent of choosing renovation over demolition. The law should evolve rather than lurch.
No less important, by following stare decisis, justices recognize that the Court is bigger than the people who happen to be serving on it, with decisions that outlast the people who make them. The judiciary is supposed to be informed by historical memory, and guided by more than its members’ whims. Stare decisis is what makes the Court an institution. Without it, the judiciary is just a collection of opinionated people.
The first of these was pointed out by Chief Justice John Roberts, who joined the 6–3 Dobbs majority that upheld Mississppi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks but did not support overturning Roe. Citing the “fundamental principle of judicial restraint,” he wrote, “It is only where there is no valid narrower ground of decision that we should go on to address a broader issue, such as whether a constitutional decision should be overturned.
Seems like we are living in an era of judicial Calvinball, where the conservative Justices freely invent pseudo-historical and pseudo-Constitutional justifications for however they want to rule.In other words, while the 1954 Court felt Plessy was egregiously wrong, its egregious wrongess was not in itself enough for the Justices to overturn the ruling. They overturned Plessy, they argued, only because they had no other viable choice.
Perhaps the conservatives in Dobbs felt similarly about Roe, but that’s not the standard they used to justify their decision. Instead, in a concurring opinion, Kavanaugh laid out his own set of rules for disregarding precedent: “(i) the prior decision is not just wrong, but is egregiously wrong, (ii) the prior decision has caused significant negative jurisprudential or real-world consequences, and (iii) overruling the prior decision would not unduly upset legitimate reliance interests.”
The problem with Kavanaugh’s checklist is that each of its elements is completely subjective. In essence, Kavanaugh believes judges should unfailingly abide by past decisions unless they really don’t want to. That’s not a way to apply stare decisis. It’s a way to scrap it.