With Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992)—two landmark Supreme Court cases that originally affirmed a “constitutional right” to an abortion—now being overturned in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the hysteria on the political left has been unrelenting.
In a casual conversation with Jacob Yusufov on the matter, in where he asked me what I make of all this, and what it means for the future of the conservative movement, I wrote this:
It’s hard to say. I want to see what the congressional polls look like by the time they come out with new ones. When the Dobbs opinion draft leaked last month, despite the outrage, Republicans went up a few percentage points. One of the reasons why I’m not enthusiastically pro-life or pro-choice is a) my opinion that abortion is necessary in rare circumstances that are, at best, statistical outliers; and b) the fact that I never understood why abortion was such a huge deal beyond Roe and Casey being horrific brain rot excuses for constitutional law. I’m glad the Supreme Court essentially delivered a huge “Fuck you” to the ideologues in the court system, and I hope that now that their politics are in the political arena (where they belong), people will see them for who they really are. Inflation is 8.4%, maybe more now. Gas is expensive, the grocery bill is atrocious. I suspect more Americans—women included—are far more concerned about those things than some court case that riles up both hardcore Christians and hardcore feminists.
I’m sure it’s going to be a factor in the midterms, but abortion is far from the “single issue voter” catalyst the Democrats want it to be. And with all this rioting, and what is quite frankly seditious nature against state capitol buildings and the terroristic planning to attack pregnancy centers seems all the more indicative of a political party that has lost its collective mind, and now they can’t hide behind the courts anymore. The curtain of American jurisprudence has been pulled back, the circus revealed.
What really sucks is that, the both of us could pen some extremely eloquent articles and responses to all of the pro-Roe v. Wade talking points. We could do a huge deep dive into the deck of cards that is American abortion jurisprudence. We could shine a glaring light on all the gaping holes in Roe, as well as how Casey gutted Roe even more. We could talk about the strawman version of stare decisis, etc. And it wouldn’t matter. Wanna know why? Because the average American cannot understand, nor will he make the effort, to understand American jurisprudence.
The only thing people care about is what the decision says, and that is articulated through politically-biased/filtered news sources. Does the outcome in Dobbs assert the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as a co-equal branch of the federal government? Absolutely. Do most people give a shit? No, no they don’t. Because for the past 50 years, generations of Americans were raised with this stupid notion that the job of a court is to contrive fictional constitutional rights, and anyone who questions that is suddenly against civil rights. No accurate assessment of the Constitution or jurisprudence required.
You can’t so much as make a sound legal argument for as to why Dobbs corrected a huge constitutional/legal catastrophe without being called a “woman hater” or “trying to control women” or something like that. Abortion was never my problem per se, my problem was always the abuse of judicial power to make it so.
