Abortion Amendments

[Adelaide]

I think that the Alabama one will be challenged and SCOTUS will strike it down, even with a conservative court.

[Sergeant Gleed]

You're saying there's no right to privacy? How very statist of you. But then, pro-lifers are statist almost by definition, as they want authoritarian government controlling people's bodies.

So good job with the Trump admin allowing employees to not include contraception in employee health plans. That will kick up the abortion rate. Just about every policy Trump backers support will kick up the abortion rate. Funny how that works. It's like they're okay with abortion, as long as it's illegal and dangerous and makes the dirty $#@!s pay for having sex.

When the imaginary "right to privacy" exists SOLELY to allow Rodent does/incubators to murder the unborn humans inside them, then, no, there's no "right to privacy".

People are secure in their papers, just ask any Rodent-inspired DUI roadblock check point.

You people find the Constitution as a useful piece of bathroom tissue and nothing more.

[MisterVeritis]

You're saying there's no right to privacy? How very statist of you. But then, pro-lifers are statist almost by definition, as they want authoritarian government controlling people's bodies.

So good job with the Trump admin allowing employees to not include contraception in employee health plans. That will kick up the abortion rate. Just about every policy Trump backers support will kick up the abortion rate. Funny how that works. It's like they're okay with abortion, as long as it's illegal and dangerous and makes the dirty $#@!s pay for having sex.

Abortion, homosexual marriage, men in the girls' bathrooms and showers are all issues for legislatures to hammer out. The courts have no proper role to play.

[MisterVeritis]

I think that the Alabama one will be challenged and SCOTUS will strike it down, even with a conservative court.

On what basis would one challenge the amendment?

[Tahuyaman]

I think that the Alabama one will be challenged and SCOTUS will strike it down, even with a conservative court.

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

[Tahuyaman]

It's difficult, if not impossible to have a rational debate about abortion. At least here anyway.

And here's evidence to support that.

You're saying there's no right to privacy? How very statist of you. But then, pro-lifers are statist almost by definition, as they want authoritarian government controlling people's bodies.

So good job with the Trump admin allowing employees to not include contraception in employee health plans. That will kick up the abortion rate. Just about every policy Trump backers support will kick up the abortion rate. Funny how that works. It's like they're okay with abortion, as long as it's illegal and dangerous and makes the dirty $#@!s pay for having sex.

[Chris]

Amendments 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10 and 14.

You confuse rights with protections. There's no grant of any right in the Constitution. So, no, wrong again.

Here is where the right was found: A FOOTNOTE TO "PENUMBRA" IN GRISWOLD v. CONNECTICUT

ince Justice Douglas's opinion for the Court in Griswold v. Connecticut, the source of the federal constitution's right to privacy has been fixed in the penumbras of the Bill of Rights. A penumbra seems a strange place to find rights to use contraception, to own obscene literature, or to have an abortion. Penumbra is an obscure word, known to few (and fewer still before Griswold). If the reader knows its meaning, it calls to mind shadows and darkness, unfortunate connotations for affirmative rights. The source of the Griswold opinion's privacy right has been controversial and critical commentary has focused on the absence of a concrete constitutional anchor for this asserted right.*

Footnote * "The criticism started as early as one of the dissenting opinions in Griswold, where, after reviewing the first. third. fourth. fifth, ninth, and fourteenth amendments, Justice Stewart asks "What provision of the Comtitution. then. does make this state law invalidry" 381 U.S. at 530."

The piece examines the different uses of penumbra in judicial decisions over history.

Holmes wrote: "It may be that it would have been better to say definitely that constitutional rules. like those of the common law, end in a penumbra where the Legislature has a certain freedom in fixing the line, as has been recognized with regard to the police power." Penumbras were for the legislature.

Hand "generally used it to denote the indistinct borders of words or concepts."

Cardozo used t simiilar to Holmes dis "in discussing the problems of legislative line drawing."

Douglas used it differently. "For Justice Douglas, penumbra had become a dead metaphor, a way to refer to an idea through an abbreviation that had been shorn of its own meaning. Douglas could have replaced penumbra with periphery or fringe with no loss of meaning or force."

And finally we get to "Why did Douglas use penumbra to describe the source of the right to privacy in Griswold?"

There is almost nothing in the history of the use of penumbra before Griswold to suggest such use. Of all its many uses, only one, in Justice Holmes's dissent in Olmstead, referred to the penumbra of any of the Bill of Rights. No published opinion used penumbra in connection with contraceptives, with marriage, or except arguably for Holmes's dissent in Olmstead, with privacy. Before Griswold, no published opinion held that rights of any sort lurked in a penumbra.

...the metaphor of penumbra provides poor support for Douglas's position. Constitutional rights do not cast shadows. They do not encompass things close to them merely because they are close, nor should they. And, to the extent that rights have indistinct edges, there is no necessary reason to think that the borders of other rights will be overlapping. Instead, Douglas should have argued that a unitary logic connects the varied provisions of the first, third, fourth, and fifth amendments. They are, at least in relevant part, expressions of an underlying idea or theme that should be given effect independent of their specific words. The metaphor of a penumbra--or an aura or emanation-is based on proximity and is mechanical, not logical. The proximity of additional rights does not add force to the argument for privacy, but the existence of a common idea in express rights does. The concept of a common theme, or the metaphor of weaving with a common thread, illustrates a better argument for privacy.

...Well-considered words can persuade; lazily adopted words can fail. Griswold's right to privacy continues to be controversial and its borders are indeed hazy and indistinct. Its ultimate reach may well be decided more by presidential elections and senatorial battles than by mere words. Nonetheless, I believe its future would be brighter if Justice Douglas had not located its source in "the partially shaded region around the shadow of an opaque body."

And again: Death by Privacy

“Our nationwide policy of abortion-on-demand through all nine months of pregnancy was neither voted for by our people nor enacted by our legislators–not a single state had such unrestricted abortion before the Supreme Court decreed it to be national policy in 1973.”–Ronald Reagan, 1983

Today, legalized abortion is the law of the land because the Supreme Court decided in 1973 that its recently created constitutional right to privacy also included a new constitutional right to abortion....

...The modern argument for a right to privacy began in 1961 in Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Poe v. Ullman....

...Harlan provided an extensive rationale for his position, which became the theoretical cornerstone for the right to privacy. Where did Harlan derive his notions about privacy rights? Melvin L. Wulf, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, claims credit for first raising the idea with Harlan in the ACLU’s friend-of-the court brief in Poe v. Ullman. Wulf later explained his strategy for getting the Court to adopt the privacy rights approach:

Judges dislike breaking entirely new ground. If they are considering adopting a novel principle, they prefer to rest their decision on earlier law if they can, and to show that the present case involves merely an incremental change, not a wholesale break with the past. Constitutional litigators are forever trying to persuade courts that the result they are seeking would be just a short step from some other case whose decision rests soundly on ancient precedent.

Since the issue of sexual privacy had not been raised in any earlier case, we employed the familiar technique of argument by analogy: If there is no exact counterpart to the particular case before the Court, there are others that resemble it in a general sort of way, and the principles applied in the similar cases should also be applied–perhaps even extended a little bit–to the new case.

...In 1965, Justice William O. Douglas adopted Harlan’s reasoning in the majority opinion in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, and the right to privacy became constitutional law....

Douglas’s decision not only found a right to privacy in a penumbra of an emanation, it manipulated the facts of the case: Estelle Griswold, the executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and Dr. C. Lee Buxton, the group’s medical director, gave information and prescribed birth control to a married couple. Griswold and Buxton, not the married couple, were later convicted and fined $100 each. The relationship at issue, then, was doctor-patient, not husband-wife. Yet Douglas framed his opinion around a presumed right to marital privacy....

...Justice Hugo Black, in his dissent, was not impressed. He attacked the way Douglas had turned constitutional law into semantics by replacing the language of actual rights with the phrase “right to privacy.” He wrote, “The Court talks about a constitutional ‘right of privacy’ as though there is some constitutional provision or provisions forbidding any law ever to be passed which might abridge the ‘privacy’ of individuals. But there is not. There are, of course, guarantees in certain specific constitutional provisions which are designed in part to protect privacy at certain times and places with respect to certain activities.”

The courts through tortured language and logic invented it.

[Tahuyaman]

It is remarkable how liberals can read the constitution and find where it explains rights which it's text does not, but deny the existence of rights the text clearly states.

[gamewell45]

Three states voted yesterday on abortion amendments to their state constitutions. One failed, two passed.

Oregon Voters Reject Anti-Abortion Constitutional Amendment

"The amendment would have prohibited state funds from being used toward abortions ― with exceptions for rape, incest and if the pregnant woman’s life was in danger ― and potentially would have limited abortion access for Medicaid recipients and public employees."

Alabama Voters Approve Anti-Abortion Constitutional Amendment

"Amendment 2 would add language to the state’s constitution that would declare and otherwise affirm that it is the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, most importantly the right to life in all manners and measures appropriate and lawful; and to provide that the constitution of this state does not protect the right to abortion or require the funding of abortion."

West Virginia, Amendment 1, No Right to Abortion in Constitution Measure (2018)

"West Virginia Amendment 1, the No Right to Abortion in Constitution Measure, was on the ballot in West Virginia as a legislatively referred constitutional amendment on November 6, 2018. It was approved."

There is no guarantee that it will be headed to SCOTUS; if no state challenges it, it'll never make it there.

States like NY, California, Vermont, Oregon, etc will most likely never amend the state constitution to eliminate abortion in those states; if certain states want to make abortion illegal, let them do it. After all they are the ones who'll end up with higher taxes in the long run and not the states who keep abortion. It could end up with states like WV & Alabama reversing what they changed.

[Chris]

There is no guarantee that it will be headed to SCOTUS; if no state challenges it, it'll never make it there.

States like NY, California, Vermont, Oregon, etc will most likely never amend the state constitution to eliminate abortion in those states; if certain states want to make abortion illegal, let them do it. After all they are the ones who'll end up with higher taxes in the long run and not the states who keep abortion. It could end up with states like WV & Alabama reversing what they changed.

That would take us back to pre-Roe days, with different laws in different states.

Not sure I get any correlation between taxes and abortion.