It’s just not pro-choicers who oppose
ending Roe
By S.E. Cupp
New York Daily News
•
May 03, 2022 at 11:00 am
Elections have consequences, they say.
Late Monday night, Politico broke what could be the most
consequential result of Donald Trump’s 2016 election, posting a leaked draft of
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s would-be majority opinion that would
overturn the landmark abortion case, Roe v. Wade.
“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,”
Alito writes, suggesting the court is merely correcting decades-old “settled
law,” what many have called “the law of the land.”
Those words, in fact, were uttered just over five years ago by
Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch, during his confirmation hearing.
“That’s the law of the land, I accept the
law of the land,” he said of the 1973 case affording women the right to an
abortion before the point of fetal viability without excessive government
restriction.
Just one year later, so convinced that Roe
was safe, Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine went on television during
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing and insisted, “I do not believe that Brett Kavanaugh
will overturn Roe v. Wade.”
Some pundits were even smug about it. Washington Post’s Kathleen
Parker penned a 2018 column titled, “Calm down. Roe v. Wade isn’t going
anywhere,” in which she mocked a legal analyst for suggesting the law might be
in peril.
“If Chicken Little and Cassandra had a baby,
they’d name him Jeffrey Toobin,” she wrote. “What new justice would want to be
that man or woman, who forevermore would be credited with upending settled law
and causing massive societal upheaval?”
Well don’t tell Gorsuch, Collins or Parker,
but if the leak is to be believed, SCOTUS is at the very least considering the
option of being those men and women.
There are so many implications from this, if
true, and you don’t have to be pro-choice to be very bothered by them.
First and foremost, overturning Roe v. Wade
would mean that in many states, terminated pregnancies could immediately become
a crime, with no exceptions for rape, incest or the health of the woman.
Draconian, anti-woman laws like that have already been passed recently by
Republicans in several states, including Texas, where a statute now makes
anyone involved in the facilitation of an abortion — from a doctor to an Uber
driver — potential accessories to the crime.
These laws are not popular, even in the states in which they were
passed.
It’s important to note that the extremists
on the far-right, who believe there should be no abortions, and the extremists
on the far-left, who believe there should be no restrictions, don’t
represent the majority of this country.
I am pro-life. I hate abortion, and wish
desperately that women confronting that difficult and awful choice felt they
had alternatives to ending the life of an unborn child. But I also believe
deeply in democracy. In this country, the Supreme Court, the highest in the
land, settles these issues and we must accept them.
Roe v. Wade is six years older than I am. I
have always accepted, like most Americans, that abortion should be legal — and,
like most Americans, that it should come with some restrictions. Overturning
the law meant overturning the will of the people, something Republicans have
become increasingly comfortable doing.
But I have to wonder if they’d be so
comfortable if liberal justices overturned conservative landmark opinions, like
the gun rights case D.C. vs. Heller, or the money-in-politics case, Citizens
United vs. FEC, or the religion case, Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby. If President
Biden or another Democratic president gets the opportunity to appoint more
liberal judges, these might not be hypotheticals.
Which gets to the next concern, which is
faith in the courts.
If the next group of justices can overturn
settled law that is widely popular and accepted even by judges as “the law of
the land,” what is the point of the Supreme Court? Unlike the other two
branches, the judicial branch is supposed to act apart from political whims. If
this court overturns Roe, Obergefell vs. Hodges, the gay marriage ruling, or
myriad other landmark cases, who will have faith that justice in America is
blind?
Then there are the political implications.
The good news for Democrats is that this unpopular move by the court would give
them a fighting chance in what was poised to be a bloodbath in November. I
can’t think of a more galvanizing issue.
Finally, there’s the leak itself.
Toobin called it “shattering,” and wondered “how
or if the institution is going to recover.” Ari Fleischer and Mike Huckabee
agreed it was awful, with both calling it, unironically, “an insurrection”
against the Supreme Court.
Whatever you think of the leak, and however
you come down on abortion, this news is deeply troubling and has vast
implications, not just for women but all American voters. And it’s just another
in a long line of chilling consequences from one election in 2016, an election
that in so many unforgivable and irreparable ways, shredded the democratic
institutions that hold this country up.