As I’ve said often enough, I read the likes of the Guardian so that you don’t have to. Ditto, Jacobin. But there’s plenty of reason to listen to and read people who are on almost the complete opposite political pole to your own. As Mill said, if they’re wrong, then you will find the truth strengthened by collision with error; if they’re right, then you’ve had the opportunity to learn something you might otherwise have missed.
If nothing else, you’ll get a good chuckle from watching lefty writers get the right answer for all the wrong reasons.
Our abortion rights shouldn’t be at the mercy of the Supreme Court in the first place.
Which is something almost all opponents of Roe v Wade agree on. So does the Supreme Court itself. The leaked ruling that is set to overturn Roe is explicitly predicated on the judgement that the court should never have taken it on itself to rule on abortion in the first place.
Watching the Jacobin writer try to figure this out is like watching a blindfolded chimpanzee trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube: hilarious for a while, then just frustrating.
The Supreme Court’s December 1 hearing on Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban confirmed what everyone had already guessed: anti-abortion justices will throw abortion rights on the scrap heap when they hand down their decision next summer.
Which is completely false. What the justices will do is hand back abortion decisions to elected lawmakers – which is something the Jacobin opinionista goes right on to endorse.
We should think more creatively and expansively about how to secure and protect abortion access throughout the country, beginning with the question of why our abortion rights are at the mercy of the judiciary in the first place.
Exactly, the justices would agree. Because that’s precisely what the leaked ruling says: it should never have been decided by judicial fiat in the first place.
In response to an outpouring of women’s liberation demands, the New York State Legislature legalized abortion on demand in 1970. Organizers expected the law would eventually be mirrored by federal legislation. Instead, in 1973, we got Roe v Wade, a sweeping decision that invalidated state statutes around the country that had outlawed abortion since the 1860s.
Which is precisely what led to the bitter, intractable abortion wars ever since – a situation unique in the West to the US. Every other Western country worked out its abortion laws by normal democratic means. As a consequence, the debate has had little of the vicious, violent fury of the US.
It didn’t have to be this way: Democratic Congresses could have passed legislation protecting abortion rights starting in the 1970s. Leaving abortion up to the court has been a political decision – a disastrous one that has finally reached a dead end.
Jacobin
Which is what the rest of us have been trying to get through to the slow kids on the left. Well, good on them, I guess, for finally almost getting it.
All that’s left is for them to realise that, holy-moley, the forthcoming Supreme Court ruling is right.
Sure, and then wait for the black ice warnings on the weather reports in Hell.