Roe v Wade, The Dissents

[JimG]

A few excerpts:

MR. JUSTICE WHITE, with whom MR. JUSTICE REHNQUIST joins, dissenting.

With all due respect, I dissent. I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court’s judgment. The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant mothers [410 U.S. 222] and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes.

MR. JUSTICE REHNQUIST, dissenting.

To reach its result, the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment. As early as 1821, the first state law dealing directly with abortion was enacted by the Connecticut Legislature. Conn. Stat., Tit. 22, 14, 16. By the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth [410 U.S. 113, 175] Amendment in 1868, there were at least 36 laws enacted by state or territorial legislatures limiting abortion.

Dissents – The American Catholic

 

[po18guy]

I find it curious that seven men awarded the right to kill their unborn children to women. I find it ‘curiouser’ still that the most vocal and vociferous proponents of abortion all seem to be beyond childbearing years. Riddle me that one, Batman!

 

[MamaJewel]

Certainly the framers of the constitution understood the right to bodily autonomy and privacy. Those concepts are reflected in the Bill of Rights, and even if they are not worded as such, the 11th amendment offers protection through those concepts. People have the right to be “secure in their persons” or, in other words to be free of government intrusions.

Abortion was not illegal in 1791, nor was an embryo or fetus counted as a person in the 1790 and subsequent census numbers. The founding fathers did not address the issue of abortion because it was private matter between a woman and her midwife or doctor when articles 3 -12 of the Constitution were proposed (1789).

If the unborn, developing human had been considered a person, an intended abortion, suspected abortion, or completed abortion would have been subject to warranted search or seizure as crime. Under the Bill of rights, a government official can not legally detain a person unless that individual is suspect in a crime. A warrant is often required to conduct a search or seizure (although there are exceptions in today’s laws). Even then, there is due process of law and the government better have sufficient reason for detaining a person to avoid violating their Constitutional rights.

No where in the law was abortion a qualifier for search, seizure, or bodily detainment The developing human clearly was not in a protected class of people at the time the Constitution was written. However, a free woman was in a protected class and was considered a person. There wasn’t any codification that required a search of a woman’s body or home in case of abortion or suspected abortion; nor was there codification for search or seizure of an abortion providers property or person.

That makes a difference in the matter. The dissenting justices must have recognized this in law. As far as the 1821 legislation out of Connecticut, that law was to protect women from dying due to poison abortions. From my understanding, the abortion laws were to protect women from the life-threatening effects of abortion back then.

All of the justices should have recognized that the Fed must consider the rights of a person over a State’s qualifications of “best interest” because what is in a State’s best interest for the common good might seriously violate a person’s constitutional rights.

The current SC justices can say abortion is a state’s right to determine best interest for the common good, instead of abortion being a 14th amendment right.

Problem is, that strips an elderly person’s 14th amendment right to autonomy and privacy when the majority of people of a state deem euthanasia to be in the best interest of the state and the common good.

Those Roe justices needed to say that bodily autonomy and privacy are protected under the 4th and 14th amendment and while a person has a right to request abortion or euthanasia, the state has every right, and an expectation, to uphold the common good and best interest of the state by highly regulating the practice of medicine and placing limits on the intentional destruction of human life.