If there’s anything everyone can agree on, it’s that Roe V Wade has absolutely no constitutional foundation whatsoever. The rationale used by the Supreme Court in 1973 is patently absurd and everybody knows it. Well, everybody used to know it. Pro-lifers still know it and the abortion-mongers knew it in the beginning even though they would never admit it. But, after fifty years of histrionic indoctrination, a younger generation often literally believes that Roe actually has a constitutional basis. I’m telling you right now, it’s utterly ridiculous.
Now before the current Supreme Court is a case out of Mississippi that many say could overturn Roe. True enough, many pro-lifers of today offer incantations of “overturn” Roe. In fact, that isn’t what they really want. They mistakenly believe overturning Roe will make abortion illegal. It wouldn’t. Overturning Roe would actually return jurisdiction over abortion to the state level. Some media reports say that in twenty six states that would indeed mean abortion would be de facto illegal because laws already on the books in those states would kick in and abortion would be kicked out. On the other hand, presumably the other twenty four states would then be free to make abortion even more liberally legal.
In my opinion, there are two things the Supreme Court doesn’t want to do with the Mississippi case. They don’t want to give up federal jurisdiction, and they don’t want to make abortion easier or legal anywhere. Either way, they probably don’t really want to overturn Roe.
Absolute legal integrity demands that Roe be overturned, but there are also some other compelling reasons not to. One problem is that the dichotomy between states is already a national security issue. An even split over such a highly charged issue would surely reignite passions that in the seventies and eighties resulted in overt warfare. And, the world is a smaller place than it used to be and many questions that were once best handled at state level, including healthcare, actually should be addressed uniformly on the federal level. I’m not giving a nod to Obamacare, I’m just saying that it can be decided either way on the federal level.
One thing I find a little bit amusing about the Mississippi case is that the media rhetoric presumes Supreme Court agreement with the fetal viability standard would overturn Roe. Whut? For those of us old enough to remember, in the beginning the fetal viability standard was considered to be reflected by Roe V Wade. So, in a back handed sort of way, the Court would actually be upholding Roe in the Mississippi case.
The abortion-mongers have defined their agenda for themselves for so long that they don’t see the other possibilities. And lets face it, if the Supreme Court in 1973 could come up with so much mumbo jumbo as they did to serve their agenda, can’t today’s Supreme Court do the same thing?
I can see this scenario. The Court upholds the fetal viability standard as the original Roe did, i.e. doesn’t overturn Roe, and then to further maintain federal jurisdiction declares violation of that standard to be a hate crime against the unborn baby. Well, abortion would still be legal as long as there is no heartbeat – which is what the abortion-mongers may experience when the Supreme Court comes up with a new and creative way to make abortion illegal in ALL fifty states.
In other words, this Supreme Court isn’t likely to see the Mississippi case as about woman’s non-existent constitutional right to abortion, but rather the autonomy and rights of the unborn baby while maintaining the federal jurisdiction. This is an argument so inconceivable to abortion-mongers that they can’t even talk about it in news media reports. The fake news does a disservice when they take sides on obviously controversial issues as they have done with abortion.
At the end of the day, there is no doubt about it, everyone will be watching from the edge of their easy chair to see how the Supreme Court goes down on this one. One way or another, it definitely is – a heart-stopper.
©2021 – Jim Casey
