What some insisted was a still-incubating draft majority decision overturning Roe v. Wade was fully born Friday: The Supreme Court has completely dismantled Roe and the series of cases upholding that core precedent, giving the states the ability to ban abortion starting from the moment of conception.
Coming on the heels of Thursday’s ruling essentially creating a national right to carry a concealed firearm, this is breathtaking proof of the conservative 6-3 supermajority’s willingness to cherry-pick its rationale to advance clearly predetermined positions.
In the gun ruling, the court blatantly ignored all contrary history and the Second Amendment’s “well regulated Militia” clause to assert a radical individual right to self-defense, no matter individual states’ interest in restricting access to handguns. In the abortion ruling, there’s a similarly blinkered, revisionist retelling of history to assert that the United States at the time of the founding never recognized any abortion right, as though that necessitates a conclusion that today, the Constitution should extend would-be American mothers no right to control the fate of the being growing inside their wombs at any point.
