About that Roe decision

One of the most interesting articles about it was this one in the New York Times (it's a gift link so you'll be able to read it) about Justice Alito's life long determination to see it overruled.  

His statements at confirmation fitted the usual deceptive pattern that all conservative judges follow:

Later that year [1985], Mr. Alito applied for another position in the Justice Department, proudly citing his role in devising a strategy for those cases. “I personally believe very strongly,” he wrote in an application, that “the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.”

Years later, when those documents were disclosed during his Supreme Court confirmation, he assured senators that while that statement reflected his views in 1985, he would approach abortion cases with an open mind as a justice, with due respect for precedent and with no ideological agenda.

“When someone becomes a judge,” he said, “you really have to put aside the things that you did as a lawyer at prior points in your legal career and think about legal issues the way a judge thinks about legal issues.”

Amongst other things of note I only learnt since the decision - about 50% of American abortions are via medication now.   How States expect to stop the inter State movement of the few pills that are needed remains to be seen.   But there will probably be States that seek to punish a woman for taking them, despite (I think) most (or all?) States saying they will criminalise abortion providers, not the women seeking an abortion.   Anyway, I still suspect that this method (not around at the time of Roe) is going to reduce the effect of this court decision in preventing access to abortion.

Also - there has been talk around how how American abortion rights were (under Roe) more liberal than those in many European countries.   (Noah Smith was going on about it.)   As many people were pointing out to him, and others, this can be very deceptive, as anyone who has experience of Australian laws would know.   Women might have the right to an abortion for any reason up to a certain time, but if they retain the right after that to have an abortion for their health, and this is broadly interpreted to include their mental health, then you can have de facto liberal access anyway.   

And I am pretty sure that it was long established that, within Australian states, having access to abortion as of right, and having it only by claiming it will hurt your mental health, resulted in virtually the same rate of abortion in each jurisdiction.   

Pro-lifers like to go on about the apparent depravity of having a right to abortion up to birth, without recognising the difficulty of getting doctors to actually agree to a late procedure.   As someone I saw on Twitter said, with rare exception, very late term abortions are about wanted pregnancies in which a serious medical problem with the baby has been discovered very late.   

Update:  Allahpundit notes this:

Once red states ban abortion entirely, forcing local pregnant women to find providers out of state, demand will quickly overwhelm supply and create long waits that will lead to women getting abortions later in their pregnancies. A 15-week national ban would prevent those abortions — but as I say, that won’t pass until 2025 at the soonest. In the short term, the perverse outcome of today’s decision is likely to mean more abortions getting pushed off into the second and even third trimesters, when babies are viable.

That is from a post about Republicans now talking about a Federal 15 week limit on abortion.  He starts:

In December I predicted that the traditional conservative rationale for overturning Roe, that the 50 states rather than the Court are the proper venue for regulating abortion, would expire five minutes after the Dobbs decision dropped. At which point it would shift instantly to “national restrictions!”

I was wrong. It took about two hours after the ruling for that decades-old federalist credo to be dumped in a ditch by House Republicans.

Here’s something I rarely say about these chuckleheads, though. The idea of a national 15-week ban is … good politics.

I think?

He's the only conservative commenter who does nuance well.