ROE V. WADE OVERTURNED

 As you have undoubtedly heard by now, on June 24, 2022, the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and determined that the United States Constitution does not contain a right to have an abortion.

For those of you who have never attended law school, I would like to describe what all law students hear when Roe v. Wade is discussed.  Law school does not teach students about every con law case that has ever been decided, only the landmark rulings that affect each of our lives.  Roe v. Wade is one of those cases.

All traditional, ABA-accredited law schools have a one-year course on constitutional law.  The course begins with a framework of how cases are decided at the federal level, which cases are appropriate for handling by the Supreme Court, and how specific clauses in the U.S. Constitution have developed, little by little, over the years.  Principles are established, rules are in place, and everyone understands that a case will be decided based upon those principles.

Then along came Roe v. Wade. 

Roe v. Wade was a case in which a result was reached, and the majority had to figure out a way to justify it.  It was not in any sense decided as a constitutional case should be decided. The issue before the court was a matter that had traditionally been determined by the states, not the federal government. There was nothing in either the Constitution or its amendments that could justify stopping states from regulating abortions.  

From a former law clerk for the United States Supreme Court, I learned in law school that the justice that had been assigned the case did not look to law books to determine how to decide the case, but he went to medical school texts and researched the issue of "viability" of a fetus, that is, when a fetus was capable of living on its own outside the womb.  

Then that justice came up with the idea that there are a whole bunch of rights which we all enjoy, and which enjoy federal protection, a "penumbra" of rights, which you can't find in the Constitution, but we are sure they are there without being mentioned. 

In short, the Roe v. Wade court made it all up.  Everyone in the legal community knew it; whether professors, lawyers or judges were pro-life or pro-choice, they all agreed this decision came out of nowhere and no foundation in any precedent. 

Roe v. Wade became the law of the land because nine unelected justices said so. 

Now, finally, Roe v. Wade has been overturned.  

It was not hard at all for the justices to do this as a matter of being faithful to the U.S. Constitution.  It was hard for the justices to do this because of the pressure coming from Planned Parenthood and the rest of the pro-abortion lobby.  The reasons for keeping Roe v. Wade in place were, in my view, purely political.  The backlash from overturning Roe v. Wade will be severe.  Expect violent protests. There has already been an attempted assassination of Justice Kavenaugh.  There have already been "doxing" protests at the justices' homes.  

In my view, it took a lot of courage for the majority to outright overturn Roe v. Wade.  

Bad precedents of the Supreme Court need to be overturned. The infamous Dred Scott decision which held that Americans of African descent were never meant to be citizens, or Plessy v. Ferguson, which held that racial descrimination was Constitutionally okay and races of people could be treated separately, in a ruling which came to be known as the "separate but equal" doctrine. Add Roe v. Wade now to the list of unsupportable decisions of the Supreme Court which, at some point, had to be overturned.