- Joined
- Jan 3, 2012
- Messages
- 14,773
- Reaction score
- 11,330
- Location
- NY
- Gender
- Female
- Political Leaning
- Liberal
It isn't a particular portion of Dobbs. It's this.Raunchy? Do you happen to have handy the portion of Dobbs that you believe supports the killing of women?
In the 14th Amendment, no person in the US can be deprived of the rights to life, liberty, and property without due process. Substantive due process applies if the right is in one of the first 8 amendments in the Bill of Rights or it's a select fundamental right "deeply rooted in in history and tradition."
In Dobbs, it's claimed that the right to abortion isn't one of the latter, and the rights to life, liberty, and property are only in the 5th amendment and related there to punishment for crimes.
Alito concludes on the basis of a poor historical review that abortion isn't a "deeply rooted" right. But one problem is that, before about 1948, abortion was more dangerous than childbirth. But after about 1948, late pregnancy and childbirth became more dangerous than legal abortion. By the time of Roe, abortion was perhaps 8-10 times safer than late pregnancy and childbirth as regards mortality risk. Now, it's 14 times safer in that regard, and for the first 10-12 weeks, it's 22-24 times safer. So self-defense of one's rights to life and to health as a basic component of liberty became an implied issue from that time.
In a long section, Alito asks, "what does a right to liberty mean?" and concludes that this is a slippery slope and certainly does not say it includes the right to protect one's own health. He ignores the mortality and serious health risks of pregnancy and childbirth for women.
When Dobbs overturns Roe/Casey, it doesn't say, but the 14th Amendment rights to life or the health component of liberty apply if a pregnancy poses an emergency risk of death or irreparable injury, or if the fetus is incompatible with life, etc., so the state would have to make an exception to an anti-abortion law then.
So it appears that a state can just make an anti-abortion law to protect a potential human life that isn't a person but has no obligation to protect a woman's right even to life and, therefore, to self-defense and the defense of a medical professional if she can pay for it. In his draft, if not in the final opinion, Alito suggests that, because most women married and were under coverture, their personhood merged into their husbands, the 14th A was never intended to apply to them. He never mentioned women who didn't marry.
He never says the fetus has rights as a person, and so a right to life, but neither does the Dobbs opinion state that the 14th amendment personal rights of life, liberty, and property DO apply to women.
When the state of Idaho made an anti-abortion law without exception even to save a woman from an immediate threat of death, it seemed to interpret Dobbs this way - that if a state wishes, it can protect fetal life and has no obligation to protect even the right to life of the woman.
So if you could get pregnant, how would it read to you? Sounds like a woman doesn't have a right to life.