RicOlie_2 said:
I’m not sure why. Roe v. Wade isn’t about whether abortion should be allowed or not. It’s about whether the U.S. Constitution guarantees a right to it. It’s mind-boggling that people could read abortion rights into the Constitution.
The Constitution doesn’t guarantee any rights for its citizens, that’s why Constitutional Amendments exist.
The 14th Amendment guarantees the right to privacy, and Roe argued that the right to be secure in your person implied the right to bodily autonomy, thus, abortion.
It’s up for debate, constitutionally, because the Constitution didn’t guarantee a lot of rights now taken for granted, such as for women to have the right to vote, so why would it guarantee the right to an abortion? Pretty sure the Founding Fathers didn’t give women any thought at all. Women were essentially property, and if you weren’t white you can forget the word ‘essentially’.
The only reason this changed was because of Constitutional Amendments such as the 14th and 19th Amendments. This, by the way, is people ‘reading’ rights into the Constitution that never existed. One may argue that there should just be more amendments then, but the last amendment to the constitution which passed both houses of congress and was ratified by the states was proposed in 1971.
For over 50 years, it has been politically impossible to get new amendments passed, even massively popular ones, as evidenced by the Voting Rights Act which languished for most of a decade before dying due to lack of state support. Thus, the process of reading new rights into the Constitution has been taken up by the courts, which of course only last until the courts decide to rescind these rights.
The right to contraceptives, the right to gay and interracial marriage, the right to abortion…all of these rights are contingent on the whims of a court which is wildly unrepresentative of the population at large, and entirely free from oversight and precedent. The last fifty years in America didn’t happen, Constitutionally speaking, and that’s before getting to work on reinterpreting the actual Constitution and its amendments.
This is a ride down a mountain without any brakes.