Dobbs was, unfortunately, correct
Think that it's OK to torture the Fourteenth Amendment? We'd be living in quite a different country right now if Trump administration officials had accepted a tortured definition of the Twelfth.
The Supreme Court released two decisions today: one to uphold the Biden administration's right to suspend the Covid-era “Remain in Mexico” policy for migrants at the southern border; the other to reign in the EPA and restore some of its power to Congress. One of these will no doubt please the left, the other the right. For what it's worth, I understand the reasoning behind both decisions even if I don't particularly like at least one of them.
That last bit is important because it informs the opinion that I (and as I've discovered, many others) have about the biggest SCOTUS decision of this term, Dobbs v. Jackson, which overturned Roe v. Wade.
I have corresponded with a number of people in the legal community, running the gamut from progressive to conservative, concerning Dobbs. To the person they've told me that this was bound to happen because the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision relied on a very liberal interpretation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution; a “right to privacy” that the Constitution does not expressly grant.
I daresay that most of us wish that the Constitution did grant an explicit right to privacy. But aside from scattered language in the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments touching on issues that may be interpreted as involving privacy, that's all that's there. So getting the Roe v. Wade decision out of the Fourteenth Amendment required, according to most legal experts, a tortured interpretation of what's actually there.
I happen to be pro-choice. I think decisions about family planning should be between families and their doctors. I have more trouble with later term abortions than I do earlier ones (a common outlook), but I still think that these should mostly be private decisions.
What informs this? Lot's of compelling evidence which suggests to me that there are far worse fates than not being born.
Roe v. Wade is not, of course, the first time that the Supreme Court has handed down a flawed decision and it won't be the last. That's why precedent has limits. If it didn't, I'd remind everyone (especially my friends on the left) that Brown v. Board of Education wouldn't have gone the way that it did and Plessy v. Ferguson might still be the law of the land.
Of course progressives, at least for the most part, don't see things this way at all. The come apart over Dobbs ranges from ridiculous to hysterical.