[link] Roe v Wade at 40: if the law was settled in 1973, the controversy is anything but

[Roe vs. Wade at 40. Posts: #1; #2; #3]

#4 from commentisfree:

Tuesday mark[ed] the 40th anniversary of Roe v Wade, the deeply polarizing US supreme court decision that created a constitutional right to abortion in every state in the country. While one’s commitment to Roe has become the litmus test for electing every president and appointing every supreme court justice in recent decades, it’s useful to recall that the case itself, decided by a 7-2 margin on 22 January 1973, became controversial largely in the rearview mirror.

As Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel point out in their landmark 2012 book, Before Roe v Wade, a good deal of the political firestorm engendered by the Roe decision came about for political and electoral reasons that had little to do with the actual result of the case. Because American legal scholars always enjoy a good after-dinner counterfactual, however, a good deal of academic debate has emerged over whether Roe caused a political backlash that has ultimately done more harm than good to the abortion rights movement.

It’s hard to know. Even supreme court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested as much last year, when she observed: “it’s not that the judgment was wrong, but it moved too far, too fast.” Ginsburg and others have suggested that had the law evolved slowly on a state-by-state basis, or been rooted in something more substantial than the amorphous privacy rights sketched out by then Justice Harry Blackmun, Roe might have stood on firmer legal footing today.

[Read the rest: commentisfree]

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Category : criminology, feminism, politics, religion, women's rights
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