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Roe v. Wade Was Set Up To Fail
We did this to ourselves.
The push notification materialized in deafening silence. News website Politico had leaked an initial draft of Supreme Court majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. The day that pro-choice America had been dreading (or had uneasily tried to convince themselves would never actually come) had dawned.
The opinion, written by conservative justice Samuel Alito, shook me to my core. My fury, however, didn’t stem from believing that Alito’s words were wrong, even if I was aghast at what they meant for America. Quite the contrary: I was furious because I knew he was right.
“The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” Alito writes. Americans can debate the merits of strict versus liberal constructionism all day long, but at the end of that day, he’s not incorrect. The Constitution was never amended to include abortion rights. Wishing it had been and believing that it should be (and I’ve done both) doesn’t change that reality. Plenty of states all over the country have blithely decimated abortion rights for years with no repercussions because Roe v. Wade was only a legal precedent, not a law.
This isn’t news to abortion rights proponents, but it isn’t as though America never had a chance to codify Roe…