SCOTUS Opinion Leaks, Suggests Roe v. Wade will be Overturned

[CopperLily]

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/02/politics/roe-v-wade-supreme-court/index.html

I'm speechless.

Not surprised - this was always the goal, but speechless. I'm going to have less rights than my mother had.

Having a real hard time not just embracing nihilism right now.

[Elayne]

It’s hard to fathom yet impossible not to belief.

They’re already putting up barricades around the Supreme Court building.

[Lustful Bride]

I'm just getting angrier the more that I think about it. Was settling in for bed when I heard it and now I'm just wide awake with anger.

[Laughing Hyena]

I have a question. Is that the end of it or can this be changed? I assume not based on the anger on this article.

[Elayne]

It’s a draft, so it can be changed.

What happens is they have an early preliminary vote, then the judges begin writing their drafts.  Then the other judges get to review the draft. 

So this ruling will go into effect, probably in two months or so.

What it means is, they had the initial vote and are at the phase of writing the opinions to be published.  So as of right now, it looks like the initial vote was to end Roe V Wade.  It could still occur with a strong public backlash that one of the 5 judges supporting the position could flip before the final publication.

Realistically, that won’t happen.  The five judges voting to end Roe V Wade are all extremely unlikely to flip.

The major take away here is that Alito specifically names “other bad Supreme Court decisions”, and the ones he lists are about gay rights and interracial marriage.

If they end Roe v Wade, they will essentially be returning to the individual states the ability to rule on whether it’s legal to have an abortion, whether it’s legal to marry outside of your race, and whether it’s legal to be gay.

[CopperLily]

It’s a draft, so it can be changed.

What happens is they have an early preliminary vote, then the judges begin writing their drafts.  Then the other judges get to review the draft. 

So this ruling will go into effect, probably in two months or so.

What it means is, they had the initial vote and are at the phase of writing the opinions to be published.  So as of right now, it looks like the initial vote was to end Roe V Wade.  It could still occur with a strong public backlash that one of the 5 judges supporting the position could flip before the final publication.

Realistically, that won’t happen.  The five judges voting to end Roe V Wade are all extremely unlikely to flip.

The major take away here is that Alito specifically names “other bad Supreme Court decisions”, and the ones he lists are about gay rights and interracial marriage.

If they end Roe v Wade, they will essentially be returning to the individual states the ability to rule on whether it’s legal to have an abortion, whether it’s legal to marry outside of your race, and whether it’s legal to be gay.

Yeah, there is a strong not-so-sub subtext of "We're not finished."

[Sara Nilsson]

I told my republican voting husband that this would happen, and he was all.. nooo they wont do that.

Fucking told you. Again.

I am so angry right now. Every poll I seen shows the majority want roe vs wade to remain. Fuck the GQP and their shit.

[CrownedSun]

I was so unsurprised by this, but still just... angry and upset..

Like, both about the decision-- about the OPINION, and what it promises are the next targets,- and just about... another domino falling in our country's slide into something ugly.

[gaggedLouise]

It’s a draft, so it can be changed.

What happens is they have an early preliminary vote, then the judges begin writing their drafts.  Then the other judges get to review the draft. 

So this ruling will go into effect, probably in two months or so.

What it means is, they had the initial vote and are at the phase of writing the opinions to be published.  So as of right now, it looks like the initial vote was to end Roe V Wade.  It could still occur with a strong public backlash that one of the 5 judges supporting the position could flip before the final publication.

Realistically, that won’t happen.  The five judges voting to end Roe V Wade are all extremely unlikely to flip.

The major take away here is that Alito specifically names “other bad Supreme Court decisions”, and the ones he lists are about gay rights and interracial marriage.

If they end Roe v Wade, they will essentially be returning to the individual states the ability to rule on whether it’s legal to have an abortion, whether it’s legal to marry outside of your race, and whether it’s legal to be gay.

It's also written in a really confrontative manner; the language feels very partisan, more like a sweeping guest speech by a lawyer at a Pro-Life conference than a SCOTUS verdict. Now I've never read a SCOTUS opinion in verbatim detail before, but as far as I know they tend to be strict about only pronouncing on the case that's actually up and constitutional/legal principles pertaining to it: it's not normal at all to call out a load of other SCOTUS decisions that were not part of the case. In this one, he deliberately lumps together Roe v Wade and Casey v Planned Parenthood and tries to sweep them out with the same broom. Casey is the one that's legally foundatory to many modern US abortion-law decisons, but AFAIK it was not part of the question here to review it. The idea here is to sink both in one smash, more or less, and this feels very out of step with how I've understood that SCOTUS is supposed to operate.  And then there's these hectoring statements about how Roe represents a grave error alien to anything that came before it...

They could almost as well have written: "Roe and Casey are commie law and alien to the Spirit of America". 

[Blythe]

Fuck. This was horrible news to wake up to.

There are some major conversations my girlfriend and I are going to have to have because of this. She was always thinking about getting at least a bilateral salpingectomy since she doesn't want kids/never wanted them and in the advent of an assault on her, didn't want that to be a worry. But with Roe v. Wade likely to be repealed in two months...yeah, she and I will need to talk about whether or not this moves up her timetable and what I can do to help and support her. :/

[Laughing Hyena]

Well it's time to add to the list of whom gets the axe come November. This is to me the kind of thing that gets people a pink slip. I'm aware that we cannot vote out judges but any standing by this deduction that can be voted out should. Also not sure who or what can fire a judge.

[DisguisedRose]

This is so fucking horrible. I’m lucky to live in a state where abortions will probably stay legal, but God, all those poor people who won’t have access to them… I read that it’s likely they’ll start making contraception even harder to access, and as someone else mentioned, rights such as same-sex and interracial marriage could also be coming to an end. I saw the news this morning and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

I hate that access to abortions is even a political issue. It should be a human right to prevent your body from going through drastic changes that could affect you for the rest of your life. Dying from childbirth/pregnancy complications is the 6th leading cause of death for women my age in the U.S. — it’s not like you’re even guaranteed to survive a pregnancy if you’re forced to go through with it. It’s just so sickening that this right is being taken away from so many people.

Fuck. This was horrible news to wake up to.

There are some major conversations my girlfriend and I are going to have to have because of this. She was always thinking about getting at least a bilateral salpingectomy since she doesn't want kids/never wanted them and in the advent of an assault on her, didn't want that to be a worry. But with Roe v. Wade likely to be repealed in two months...yeah, she and I will need to talk about whether or not this moves up her timetable and what I can do to help and support her. :/

Your girlfriend should definitely get started on getting sterilized ASAP. I’m not sure how old she is, but if she’s young and doesn’t have children, it’s very likely she’ll get denied by a few doctors before getting approved. The process can take years if you’re particularly unlucky. I know because I’m trying to get that same procedure, and I’m preparing for my first consultation with a big binder full of info/statistics to show I’m serious about it. Side rant, but if I’m old enough to decide to bring 10 children into this world, I’m old enough to know I don’t want them. Just like Roe v. Wade getting repealed, denying sterilization is another way to control women’s bodies…

[Azy]

I'm hoping that there will be enough outrage from the public for at least one judge to change their mind.  This was never about abortion itself.  It was about safe abortions.  But I guess these people want to go back to women throwing themselves a flight of stairs, or lifting pianos.  Yeah, I read somewhere when prostitutes in the old west suspected they were pregnant they'd lift the piano in the saloon.  There was an herb that I think was used by Roman women that was used into extinction, but there are other drugs for other things that basically do the same thing.  Of course women will have to buy them from drug dealers, and if something goes wrong they'll fear seeking medical help.  They say they're saving unborn babies, but the truth is, they ain't saving shit.  They're killing women. 

[Lilias]

There was an herb that I think was used by Roman women that was used into extinction, but there are other drugs for other things that basically do the same thing.  Of course women will have to buy them from drug dealers, and if something goes wrong they'll fear seeking medical help.

Misopristol sales have been rising for a while, but I suspect they're about to soar. Sexually active women are advised to take pregnancy tests regularly, so they can catch it early enough for the drugs to work safely, but all that will take some time, planning and money that a lot of people don't have. And of course, the investigation of miscarriages for signs of foul play has already begun. Great investment of police and law resources, innit?

[CopperLily]

Misopristol sales have been rising for a while, but I suspect they're about to soar. Sexually active women are advised to take pregnancy tests regularly, so they can catch it early enough for the drugs to work safely, but all that will take some time, planning and money that a lot of people don't have. And of course, the investigation of miscarriages for signs of foul play has already begun. Great investment of police and law resources, innit?

There will of course not be criminal charges against companies whose production byproducts have been shown to cause pregnancy loss.

[Laughing Hyena]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sOZTy0h6XZY

The party of elephants just shot themselves in the foot with every young woman out there. Guess when it comes to their bodies the GOP is saying "Your body, my choice" Well I hope said GOP are ready to reap the consequences come November.

[Vekseid]

Well it's time to add to the list of whom gets the axe come November. This is to me the kind of thing that gets people a pink slip. I'm aware that we cannot vote out judges but any standing by this deduction that can be voted out should. Also not sure who or what can fire a judge.

You can impeach them from the Supreme Court. This works like impeaching anyone - you need a 2/3rds vote to convict in the senate.

Ultimately, that's really the only way to handle this. They are going to take apart a century of legal precedent enacting their goals, here, not just on abortion, but also LGBT and election rights. Packing the court may also be an option - the court has already lost its dignity with this.

The only thing legislating national access to abortion will do is to get politicians on record, and to watch Alito or whoever (Gorsuch, maybe) invent some tortuous language to cast it down. Useful for its own sake, but it wouldn't have changed this.

[Lilias]

Not wasting time, are they?

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/06/us/tennessee-abortion-pills-by-mail-bill/index.html

https://www.truthorfiction.com/louisiana-iud-bill/

[Nowherewoman]

Maybe if the States went back to discriminating against and exploiting Irish and Italians, they way they once did, instead of just women and the melanin-endowed, the Court would get a clue?

Oh, and Catholics. Funny how easily people forget where they came from.

Just a thought.

[Azy]

I do hope this bites Republicans in the ass this November.  The numbers I'm hearing are 66% of all Americans want abortion/family planning to be legal.  That includes Republicans too.  Stephanie Gresham I think her name is, said on The View yesterday that while the economy and rising costs have been and will continue to be the main thing on American's minds at the poles this year, this leak made abortion a top issue now as well.  Even some life long Republicans are seriously pissed that the system of checks and balances that keep one party from running everyone else over are being worked around. 

[TheGlyphstone]

Its unfortunately a lot more...muddled than it seems, so its probably not going to hurt them at all. Fivethirtyeight has run a few good articles on the topic, here's the latest:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/where-americans-stand-on-abortion-in-5-charts/

[Azy]

Yes, most of the people who don't want to see abortion be completely outlawed do think there should be limits.  I used to, but then I read an op ed about 2 years ago written by a woman who also used to believe in limits until a pregnancy she wanted to carry to term went real bad on her at about 24 weeks I think it was.  There was so much wrong with her baby that the doctor told her it didn't stand any chance of survival outside the womb.  Those are the kind of things people don't think about.  She lived in a state with a 20 week ban, and had to travel to a state with no restrictions to be induced and get the grieving over with.  She said it would've mentally destroyed her to carry around a fetus she knew was going to die shortly after birth. 

[Saria]

I do hope this bites Republicans in the ass this November.  The numbers I'm hearing are 66% of all Americans want abortion/family planning to be legal.  That includes Republicans too.  Stephanie Gresham I think her name is, said on The View yesterday that while the economy and rising costs have been and will continue to be the main thing on American's minds at the poles this year, this leak made abortion a top issue now as well.  Even some life long Republicans are seriously pissed that the system of checks and balances that keep one party from running everyone else over are being worked around.

This is the same song I hear every American election cycle. “Oh, the Republicans have done <insert most recent horrific thing here*>! Americans won’t stand for that! They’ll surely punish them at the polls!”

* Some examples of horrific things Republicans have done, and NOT been “punished” for

• passed a wildly racist law
• started a war based on lies
• refused to provide universal health care
• financed terrorists/death squads in another country
• prosecuted a pointless and expensive “war on drugs”
• overthrew a democratically-elected government and installed a bloody, ruthless dictator
• passed homophobic/transphobic laws
• refused to confirm legitimate Democratic judges, and instead pushed their own shady judges through
• incited a coup attempt
• …

And yet, they don’t.

Every election cycle is another neck-and-neck race, usually with Democrats winning the popular vote—but not always—yet Republicans still have more than enough support to maintain majorities because of a broken electoral system.

At this point, it’s delusional—a literal denial of reality—to believe that, despite everything, Republican voters really are decent and empathetic people who will care about anyone or anything other themselves enough to be outraged at whatever the most recent injustice committed by the Republican Party happens to be. If someone was even still considering voting Republican in 2022, then that means they weren’t turned off of the party by its racism, its sexism, its homophobia, its islamophobia, its transphobia, its disdain for the poor, for minorities, or for the most vulnerable. Yeah, sure, abortion rights will be the thing they finally care about </sarcasm>. Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely, something that will make it easier for women to have more consequence-free sex—more female pleasure—yeah, that’s absolutely something that Republican voters will be moved by </megasarcasm>.

No, TheGlyphstone is correct, and I’d say the key chart is the last one on the link. The one that shows how little Republicans care about abortion, once they started “winning” the issue. In fact….

The American political landscape is so sad and depressing right now. I see think-piece after think-piece hoping beyond hope that this—the abortion issue—maybe this is the issue that will suddenly change the zeitgeist, and get people voting progressively… or at least, get them to stop voting for the party of white supremacist conspiracy kooks. If not that, maybe benevolent aliens will intervene, and fix things for us! Or, you know, maybe magic. Or whatever.

It’s all escapist fantasy thinking. No, the overturning of Roe v Wade will not make America’s heart grow three sizes, assuming it still even has one.

So, yeah, sorry, Americans; sitting back and waiting for some magical event to trigger a change in your political landscape… that just ain’t gonna happen. If you want things to change, you’re going to have to get off your asses, and take real action†.

† “Real action”

† And, being Americans, I imagine you have no idea what “taking real action” means, and immediately leapt to assuming it means loading up on guns and charging through a hail of bullets to overthrow your government by bloody force. No, while there is certainly a time and a place for violent action, that’s not the only way to fight for change, and it’s rarely the most effective.

“Taking action” doesn’t even necessarily mean protesting. Protesting is all fine and good… but that’s taking action after the damage has already been done. That’s taking action too late, and it’s all reactive, and usually just trying to undo the most recent catastrophe and get us back to the ever-so-slightly-less shitty place we were at just before. It’s fine as an emergency response, but it would be better to be proactive, and fight to stop catastrophes that require protesting from happening in the first place.

There are a million things you could do that would count as direct action… but the key thing is that you will never accomplish anything unless you work with others… something Americans seem particularly bad at. They have no trouble imagining themselves as lone heroes Rambo-ing their way to a better future… but ask them to even say “hello” to their neighbours, let alone working with them, and, hoo boy, well that’s just unthinkable.

This isn’t the place to detail ways to take effective, direct action, so I’ll just leave a key phrase and a link where you can get started on researching the idea, if you really care: mutual aid.

[Annaamarth]

... So, yeah, sorry, Americans; sitting back and waiting for some magical event to trigger a change in your political landscape… that just ain’t gonna happen. If you want things to change, you’re going to have to get off your asses, and take real action†.

Beau of the Fifth Column, linked by Laughing Hyena above, has recently talked about the different kinds of political action - direct, indirect, electoral, whatever - as well has how to form community networks.

For what it's worth, anyone looking for a point-of-contact in the PNW of the USA can feel free to reach out to me via DMs for coordination - barring site policies forbidding such, of course.

[Thufir Hawat]

Also not sure who or what can fire a judge.

I think in the USA they can be impeached? Though getting two thirds majority in the Senate might well count as pipe dream.